Using Scrum and Experiments to industrialise and Scale DevOps in a Large Bank
All super heroes need tools… like thor’s hammer or iron man’s suit, scrum teams require dev ops to make them powerful All Super heroes have awesome gadgets, tools and support to allow them to be as powerful as they are. For example, Thor has the hammer, Iron Man has the suit and Batman has Lucius Fox that supports Batman with running his business and provides the car, weapons and gadgets. Scrum teams also require the necessary support, tools and gadgets to make them Super Heroes. This is where DevOps fits in. I have worked in many organisations (mainly large financial institutions) where they are embarking on Agile transformation. They typically have the best intent, but as teams start going through the journey, they get blocked by all the organisational impediments that exist. For teams, this is mainly related to high-levels of bureaucratic processes, governance to get Software released into the production environment. This typically leads to a Water-Scrum-Fall environment, where teams build features in sprints, but can only deploy in a big-bang approach as the environment doesn’t support them. Over and above, they then need to handover to a production team that will support the software. Ultimately, the customer suffers as they have to wait months to obtain valuable features. “Continuous Delivery (CD) and DevOps are both complementary ways of working. The former assists with shipping quality software quickly, the latter helps harmonize the teams that deliver and support said software. Both approaches can help you to optimize, streamline, and improve the way you work. Ultimately, both will help you ship quality software” – Continuous Delivery and DevOps - A quickstart Guide (2nd Edition) – Paul Swartout The adoption and growth of DevOps is accelerating and I believe this is as a result of organisations adopting Agile and struggling implementing the principles and practice that the Agile Manifesto promotes – E.g. early and continuous delivery of valuable software, deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. I have been assisting a large financial institution with their Enterprise Agile transformation and they have acknowledge the importance of DevOps to enable their teams to be more ‘Agile’ and ultimately change the way they work. My talk will introduce important concepts and understanding of what is CD and DevOps by my practical experience and story of how we are using Scrum to build the DevOps capability; with the objective of industrialising DevOps within the organisation allowing the teams to then deliver working software frequently.
