SITUATION

Most developers are using a scrum based development process. I wonder why, because it’s definitely not well suited for DevOps teams. Let me tell you why! With Scrum, you commit your team to fullfill a defined and agreed amount of stories within the upcoming sprint due to the sprint planning. Your business owner and the sprint team agree on the commitment. It is based on the calculated or estimated team velocity. So far so good. But what happens in real life?

REAL LIFE

During a sprint, a super critical bug comes in and has to be solved, which eats up the storypoints that where planned for anything else. Or one of your team members gets ill. So you can’t bring those advertised storypoints to the street. Or a competitor releases a feature that is a game changer and has to be implemented as well, or your customer / BO suddenly changes his mind about a feature which leads to massive refactoring, or… you get the point.

You could fight these things by not assigning all available storypoints to a sprint and keep headroom for unforeseen incidents. That’s what you can do with the virtual team feature of ResourceCloud. But in fact, scrum is not well suited in those agile environments. We tend to list all stories in the backlog and dynamically change the priorities of them as long as they are in the backlog. We got rid of the sprint rhythm, because it introduces long reaction times. So to keep track of when a feature or story will be finished, ResourceCloud dynamically recalculates the possible finishing week / day of a story continuously. So you always have a good estimation on when a feature/ bugfix/ story will be ready for production.