According to one survey, 88% of IT professionals think DevOps is important or critical for their organization to be successful. One skill that becomes increasingly important for Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters, is DevOps. DevOps is the practice and toolset designed for the fine-tuning of a software delivery pipeline, inculcating harmony between the development team and operations, and expediting time-to-market results. Of course, that doesn’t mean every single agile team will have a dedicated DevOps expert. As an expert in Agile methodologies and tools, a Scrum Master will have to gain strong knowledge of DevOps methodologies and tools. But why exactly is it important for a Scrum Master to understand DevOps?
Alignment of Goals: Where DevOps and Agile cross is in their common goals of getting the very best software out the door as quickly and efficiently as possible. Proficiency in DevOps paradigms allows Scrum Masters to align the Agile team processes with the overall vision of DevOps for fostering an environment laden with collaboration and continuous improvement.
Enabled Integration: The separation line between development and operations is gradually getting thin. DevOps facilitates integration, mixing development, testing, deployment, and operation efforts into a smooth, automated flow. And this integration can further be hastened by the Scrum Master who is quite familiar with DevOps practices, as they will break the silos down for the cross-functional teams to merge organically.
Augmented continuous delivery: This involves the underlying DevOps ideology, which consists of the basis of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). These enable teams to build CI/CD pipelines, automatically take care of routine jobs, and implement release orchestration enablers for the purpose of improving the speed and reliability of software release.
Increase Collaboration: Collaboration and communication are a backbone of DevOps, starting from development to operations and beyond. Inspiration and enabled collaboration by the team members with best practices sharing attitude and responsibility of the team towards the delivery ecosystem together among themselves.
Empowered Troubleshooting: DevOps delivers a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement. Scrum Masters will be committed to DevOps methodologies and enable the team to develop the state of mind with resilience and adaptability to be able to navigate through any challenges and find the opportunities therein.
Though Scrum Masters might not master every DevOps tool, having a basic understanding of the following tools could go a long way for them when the teams do not have a DevOps specialist. This will help Scrum Masters to guide their teams in adopting DevOps culture with a little overview of DevOps tools and methodologies and grow a synergistic ecosystem ripe for continuous innovation. The key DevOps tools that every Scrum Master should get acquainted with are: Jenkins: Open-source automation server with hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying, and automating any project.
Docker: A versatile containerization platform easing application building, shipping, and running of applications.
Ansible: Provision and manage infrastructure and applications in a configuration management and automation tool.
Git: In simple terms, it is a cooperative code repository system.
Terraform: This is an infrastructure as a code tool that allows the provisioning and management of cloud resources.
Prometheus: A comprehensive monitoring and alerting toolkit for system performance and reliability.
Kubernetes: An open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and administration of containerized applications.
Gaining a rudimentary comprehension of these DevOps tools and methodologies equips Scrum Masters to be the front-runners in embracing the DevOps culture with their teams, fostering a synergistic ecosystem ripe for perpetual change.
