How to Develop a Scrum Support for DevOps Teams

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of several methodologies for dynamic project management. DevOps is an emerging methodology that helps teams develop and bring results.

The problem is that many of these frameworks work under different approaches, which raises doubts about the possibilities of integrating concepts such as Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, DevOps.

Is it possible to unite the DevOps teams’ culture with the methodological dynamism of this methodology? In this article, we will respond to this question and let you know how they both work together, or not.

What are DevOps and Scrum, anyway?

1. DevOps

DevOps is a movement, a cultural shift that relies on increasing communication, collaboration, and harmony between developers and IT operations teams to provide continuous delivery to customers, with less cost and a lower percentage of bugs.

With the standardization of production environments, the old segmentation between departments closed in on themselves to the point of transforming a single project into true autonomous micro-projects.

With little information (and sometimes interest) regarding each other’s activities, the result of this isolation between IT teams is slow deliveries, numerous failures, customer dissatisfaction, outages, deadlines, in addition to the old competition between teams development and operations.

The DevOps teams culture aims to redesign the way a software project is thought within IT.

All project steps (from requirements definition to implementation) are to be all together.

This avoids, for example, communication failures such as the development of software that does not run properly due to its incompatibility with the server structure (the gap between programmers and infrastructure staff).

In addition, the use of automated deployment ensures the delivery of applications faster and more assertively, freeing the team to dedicate itself to other stages of the project.

With the DevOps teams culture:

  • Competition between infrastructure teams and developers;
  • There are relevant improvements in the planning of the production environment, which results in projects delivered on time and without exceeding the estimated budget;
  • Integration between teams results in more effective monitoring of developed applications;
  • Solutions with greater stability and performance; among other benefits.

2. Scrum

Scrum is also an agile software development methodology that, like DevOps, aims to provide greater speed and organization in project management, especially IT projects.

It is an incremental project management strategy, ideal for difficult-to-predict or highly mutable scenarios.

Therefore, the team simply follows pre-defined steps to achieve results imagined at the beginning of the requirements formulation.

Instead, it is a powerful set of values ​​and practices for managing complex work, in which it is impossible to predict everything that will happen throughout the stages of the project.

These values ​​provide the basis for the organization in question to add its particular engineering and management practices, which makes this methodology one of the most adaptable among the agile strategies in the market.

Projects fragment into cycles, and they are Sprints. The Sprint is a Time Box, within which a series of tasks must have a performance, starting and ending on fixed dates. In general, Sprints are of the same duration.

Each task consists basically of the following roles:

  • Product Owner: team leader, responsible for choosing the resources and ordering the steps to be followed;
  • ScrumMaster: responsible for helping everyone involved, acting as a coach, a facilitator to integrate all team members and disseminate Scrum principles, values, and practices;
  • Development Team: Here, designers, programmers, architects, QAs, and database administrators are brought together in a multidisciplinary team (usually between 5 and 9 members), whose responsibility is to work on the design, construction, and testing of the product.

Check some of the features:

As with DevOps, clients are an integral part of the development process.
The division of tasks by Sprints helps in time management and verification of inaccuracies, making activities faster and more assertive;

The focus is on frequent and intermediate deliveries. This does not mean delivering half-delivered, on the contrary: it establishes that each delivery must add value and be 100% ready;

The entire project evolution process is discussed through frequent meetings (usually they are daily and, in general, do not exceed 15 minutes).

In these meetings, all team members will discuss what they did the day before to reach the goal. Also, what they planned to do until the following day in pursuit of the outlined objectives.

The most important thing is always what you do first. Thus, it is very common, in this type of methodology, to organize priority lists known as Product Backlogs.

The activities of inserting new items and improving the Product Backlog are Grooming. It is essential to keep the team organized and aware of the order of execution of tasks.

How to integrate DevOps and Scrum in the same project?

The DevOps culture works by providing greater transparency in the content of Sprints to all members of the IT team. Of course, all phases of the project need development on a unified platform.

Access to the same records, available to the development and operations team, helps to format the activities of each Sprint, in addition to allowing the sharing of ideas between the SM, Product Owner, and Development Team.

At the end of each Sprint, all information is in internal post-its, drafts. Without even reaching the knowledge of the other IT team that would handle the project at a more advanced stage.

In recent times, methodologies and DevOps are being used more frequently and together.

On the one hand, we have the DevOps culture, which provides greater transparency in the content of Sprints for members of the IT team. It is possible since all phases of the product need development in a single language on the platform.

On the other hand, we have an agile culture, which seeks to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

The importance of these methodologies for DevOps teams

These two methodologies you can apply independently. However, with the current scenario and the problems that arise in the elaboration and development of a project. The union of the two methods allows for quick corrections according to new demands and requirements. In addition to guaranteeing constant feedback from the customer.

This issue you can consider a communication failure that leads to product failures. With the integration with DevOps teams, records remain in the system. And the creation of the documentation becomes accessible to the entire IT team.

One considerable integration point is the harmonization between developers and operators. This favorable environment creates a hierarchical process of project actions, generating autonomy for each member.

However, we know that the world undergoes constant changes and the labor market is not away. Thus, the union of development teams with IT programmers presents new resources for project success.

With the integration provided by DevOps teams, all these digital records remain in the system. It generates documentation that makes room for traceability accessible to the entire IT team.

The business world is changing rapidly and IT must respond to these changes. To deal with these transformations, IT needs to change the entire operational flow.

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