DevOps and Scrum are two modern software development approaches that aim to improve collaboration, communication, and delivery. Integrating DevOps practices into Scrum frameworks can maximize the benefits of both. This allows teams to rapidly build, test and release software while maintaining high quality.
Understanding DevOps and Scrum
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). For example, DevOps outsourcing company focuses on excellent communication and collaboration between developers and ops professionals. Key DevOps practices include:
- Continuous integration – automatically building, testing and merging code changes frequently
- Continuous delivery – automating release processes to push changes to production rapidly
- Infrastructure as code – programmatically managing infrastructure
- Monitoring and logging – tracking key metrics and system health
Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for managing complex software projects. Scrum teams work in short, fixed-length cycles called sprints that are typically 2-4 weeks.
Key aspects of Scrum include:
- Product backlog – prioritized list of features/requirements
- Sprints – short, timeboxed cycles to complete work
- Daily standups – quick daily progress check-ins
- Retrospectives – reviewing what went well and what needs improving
Integrating them combines speed and quality. And this is justified in practice because the most widely used Agile framework is Scrum. The 16th annual report from Digita.ai states that 87% of businesses that use Agile frameworks employ Scrum.
Benefits of Integrating DevOps and Scrum
Integrating DevOps and Scrum practices can offer several key advantages:
Faster Feedback Loops
Performing continuous integration and delivery in each sprint gives faster feedback on product quality. Teams can catch issues early and review working software, meeting customer needs faster.
Improved Collaboration
Shared ownership across dev and ops fosters closer collaboration. Joint standups and retrospectives break down silos.
Higher Deployment Velocity
Automated pipelines allow multiple production deployments per sprint. New features can be continuously released to customers.
Enhanced Quality
Test automation and version control improve code quality and system stability. Monitoring provides insight to improve system design.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
Faster delivery of working software and quicker response to feedback increases customer satisfaction.
Integrating them helps teams maximize the business value delivered.
Integrating Key Practices
When it comes to actually integrating DevOps into the sprint workflow, there are some key practices that Scrum teams should focus on. These will help transform how you build and deliver software:
Continuous Integration in Sprints
It is essential that your developers merge code into a shared mainline multiple times a day. Rather than long-lived feature branches, you want small code changes flowing to the main codebase regularly.
Set up a CI server like Jenkins that performs automatic builds and runs unit and integration tests whenever changes are checked in. If anything breaks, the team knows fast. I’d recommend configuring it to build after every single commit – it really helps developers get rapid feedback if they introduce any defects.
Making this part of your standard sprint process means potential issues don’t linger long before being spotted. You prevent “integration hell” down the road!
Infrastructure as Code with Backlog Tasks
Managing all your environments – dev, test, production – should be automated via machine-readable scripts or definition files rather than manual processes.
For example, Ansible playbooks can be used to set up and update servers, and tools like Terraform allow you to define entire cloud infrastructure environments via code.
This allows version controlling and standardizing environment changes so you can track them and roll them back if needed. It also lets you test infrastructure changes before applying them to production.
Make managing infrastructure this way a standard practice – add tasks to track this work to your sprint backlogs. The ops folks should be able to code up environment changes just like application work!
Deployment Pipeline for Continuous Delivery
Setting up a continuous delivery pipeline is essential for faster customer release. The pipeline should automate building, testing and deployment to multiple environments, such as dev, test and prod.
New code merged via CI can flow through this pipeline automatically. Automated tests validate changes along the way before any manual approvals promote builds to the next env.
Ideally, you want full automation in production – any build passing tests get deployed. This allows multiple upgrades to be delivered per sprint without ops bottlenecks!
The key is having visibility and quality checks in place so you can deploy rapidly while controlling risk. This process is enabled by CI, infrastructure-as-code and comprehensive test automation.
Monitoring and Logging
Adding logging instrumentation to code and monitoring key application and infrastructure metrics provides visibility. Data can be used to optimize performance. Monitoring tasks can be sprint backlog items.
Retrospective Meetings
Retrospective meetings should include ops members to get holistic feedback. Teams can identify what processes to improve, share knowledge, and strengthen collaboration.
With some adaption, these practices can be integrated into sprints. Let’s examine two main approaches.
Two Models for Integration
When structuring your teams, you’ve got two approaches for embedding that DevOps skillset:
DevOps Embedded Inside Scrum Teams
The most direct model is having your DevOps engineers work directly within the feature teams. So, each Scrum team has dedicated ops folks working on tasks like configuration management, monitoring, deployments, etc.
This really helps strengthen relationships between dev and ops. Sitting together, constant communication, jointly fixing issues that come up – you knock down barriers and work better together when it’s one tight-knit team.
Tradeoff is it can be hard to scale horizontally as ops talent gets spread thin. Need to hire more specialists which has overhead. Works best for a small/mid-size engineering org.
DevOps as a Separate Support Team
Alternatively, you could have a centralized Site Reliability Engineering team that provides shared ops support to various product teams.
This SRE squad can own the core pipelines, tools and infrastructure that all teams utilize. Frees the feature teams to focus on new product code.
Enables leveraging ops talent across teams. Can scale horizontally more easily by growing a centralized SRE team.
Risk is less tight collaboration with devs. Need to make effort to actively engage with feature teams through meetings, demos, pairing etc. Also takes discipline to not become a blocking dependency!
So, in summary, there is no universally right answer! It depends on your existing organizational structure and size. But either way, collaboration is key for it to work smoothly!
A Sample Integrated Workflow
Here is one way DevOps practices could be integrated into a Scrum team’s 2-week sprint:
- Sprint Planning: The team selects user stories from a priority-ranked backlog, including some ops tasks (e.g., upgrading the database). Dev and ops split stories for planning.
- Continuous Integration: Code changes are committed to the CI server, running build and automated tests several times daily.
- Daily Standup: Devs and ops update the status of stories and any blockers.
- Code Deploys: Successful CI builds auto-deploy to the test environment for validation. Manual approval is deployed to staging and then production.
- Monitoring: Ops reviews system metrics dashboards for emerging issues. Logs auto-aggregate to analytics.
- Sprint Review: Team demos feature functionality and ops upgrades. Stakeholders provide feedback.
- Sprint Retrospective: The team reflects on what worked well and what needs improvement and plans process changes for the next sprint.
This builds a collaborative, iterative rhythm, delivering user value quickly and reliably.
Conclusion
Integrating DevOps and Scrum combines two leading approaches to improve agility, quality and team collaboration.
Automating deployments through CI/CD pipelines, managing ops via code, monitoring system metrics, and optimizing processes allows Scrum teams to ship working code quickly. This fosters closer collaboration between dev and ops.
Executive leaders must drive strategic organizational change by promoting culture shifts, skills development, and technology transformations.
Adopting these integrated best practices leads organizations to maximize the value delivered through higher team productivity, software quality and customer satisfaction.
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