The Hitchhikers Guide to Scrum with DevOps
By: Rob Healy
Tags: DevOps, Serious Scrum, Scrum, Scrum Team, Hitchhikers Guide

Fig 1: Hitchhiking the Galaxy, from pixabay

To: “Heart of Gold Team”

From: “F Prefect CSM, PSM”

Re: New-ish Team Members

Dear Team,

We’ve been doing very well over the last 6 months. Ever since we updated our Social Contract to agree to visualise all our work (anything that takes longer than an hour now has a ticket of some sort) we’ve improved our Transparency and, with it, our ability to Inspect and Adapt. Well done to all.

However, I can’t help feeling that we are not taking a full systems-approach to visualising work. There is a whole load of other work happening daily that we’re accountable for but are not yet visualising. This came clear to me last week when Maurizio mentioned just how much of a saving we had managed to make by tighter coupling of our automated tests into our CI/CD build pipeline. I propose we should run an experiment to see if changing this helps us.

So with no further ado, I’d like to introduce our four new(-ish) team members:

Zaphod

Trillian

Marvin

IOTA

If these were real people I’d ask them to introduce themselves to you all but, since they are only personas of non-sentient entities, I’d better do that for them.

Zaphod (Beeblebrox)

Our build and deploy pipeline. Formerly known as: makefile; Hudson (once upon a time); Jenkins; Octopus Deploy; Gitlab Pipelines. Consistently a high-focus area for us — mostly because it was so unstable for so long that we had a daily “Build Monkey” award. It remains a priority to keep Zaphod predictable at least for his nightly builds. The more frequently we can get him working, the shorter our time to deploy and the better overall we are doing. As a result I’d like to integrate Zaphod’s work onto our boards to see just how often we’re getting him to build and how often he is doing it successfully.

Fig 2. The needlessly attention-seeking “Zaphod”, from pixabay

Trillian

Our suites of automated tests. Statistically, Trillian is by far and away our hardest worker (no disrespect meant to anyone here!). Her integration test suites work tirelessly for 10 to 12 hours every night while we are sleeping. Her long-form performance test suites run over the weekend for up to 50 hours. Again, I’d like to visualise Trillian’s daily work along with our own — the more tests she can do and the earliest stage in our process, the less tests we have to perform manually. Some of the greatest work we’ve been able to do to improve our quality — and by extension, our productivity — has been shifting our testing left and getting more done at a unit- and pre-integration (mock) level. David’s cracking idea to alter the start and end date of our sprints to mid-week to allow the extra weekend for additional testing has been a game changer for us. Trillian is like that; she relishes extra work, especially dull repetitive work the rest of us don’t like! I don’t think we are quite yet at a trillion tests per year but the “Trillian Trillion” has a nice ring to it and might be something to consider!

Fig. 3 “Trillian” hard at work, from pixabay

Marvin

Our documentation (customer facing and internal). Poor Marvin. He knows so, so much and is so under-loved. Nuala has done a brilliant job of improving the quality, consistency and completeness of our documentation over the last year. Our move from on-disk to hosted user guides has meant that both support and UX can now see where customers are struggling with the product. As a result our roadmap is full of data-driven improvements designed to make the customer journey’s easier. Our new on-boarding documentation from Peter and Alex has made getting new hires such as Steven up to speed that bit easier. I know that writing, reviewing and even reading the documentation can feel like the biggest chore but the answers to Life, the Universe and Everything are all within the perennial depressed Marvin. Probably on page 42! We will be visualising work to keep Marvin updated for internal and external use going forward.

Fig 4. Marvin sorting alphabet soup at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, from pixabay

IOTA

Our spanking brand new Continuous Assurance and Auto-Remediation toolset. Congrats again to Edwin and Amanda on the work you’ve been doing for the team on this one. Support absolutely love it and, to be fair, the number of support calls we are getting has fallen. Also when we get a support ticket to triage we no longer need to worry about the available logs not being attached. IOTA has already codified all the support knowledge base and is providing 24/7 monitoring and event driven automation to attempt to rectify issues before they even become apparent to customers. Management tells me that they are now calling this “Tier 0” support as it is fixing issues before the Support Team (Tier 1) are even aware that they exist. Management is looking at this as a competitive advantage, and they are considering using it in Sales and Marketing material. Maurizio tells me that some of the instabilities that IOTA is repeatedly auto-fixing are real issues that simply couldn’t have been discovered outside the scale of Production. I know there are lots of conversations around other work IOTA could do for us, our products and the company and we will be visualising these going forward.

Fig 5. IOTA monitoring live network systems, from pixabay

Next sprint I’d like us to experiment with adding these personas to the board and our work. I hope by doing so we’ll get a truer reflection of what work our expanded team actually does, even when most of us are not at work.

Best regards, your Scrum Master,

Ford

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