How can we do Continuous Delivery in Scrum? With Eric Landes

Agile Coaches' Corner

In this episode, Eric Landes addresses the challenge of doing Continuous Delivery on a Scrum team. Many teams and organizations struggle with Continuous Delivery, and some think that in a Sprint there can be only one release. Or, they struggle with getting their Increment good enough to be “potentially shippable.” What’s a Scrum Team to do?

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Key Takeaways:

The 2020 Scrum Guide talks about Scrum teams creating multiple increments within one Sprint. Now the Scrum Guide is encouraging frequent releases. Which makes my DevOps-focused heart sing!

What does this mean to your teams? In my opinion, aiming to deliver to production frequently helps your team focus on quality. The Scrum Guide does not specifically say to release to your customer. Potentially shippable is the term, but I encourage teams to aim for customer feedback through frequently releasing to production! If the team makes releasing to Production part of their DoD, they need to figure out what that means in their organization. How do they ensure high quality and safety for the product before it gets to the customer?

For software teams, this would include thinking of automated testing and automated deployments. Teams that adopt these practices include that work when decomposing PBIs into your Sprint plan. This thinking helps the team focus on how they can automate other requirements to meet organization standards and remove bottlenecks to production deployments. For instance, if your organization has compliance policies, your team may be able to automate compliance verification. This can be done using third-party tools, or your team can customize the automation necessary for compliance verification.

Discuss these options within your team. Help team members think outside the box for solutions. For organizations that have gates in place, like a change advisory board (CAB), talk through options that meet the requirements. For example, your CAB requires a list of new features that are being deployed. Use release automation to automatically create release notes and notify CAB members of the notes.

Most of the time, teams object to continuous delivery based on organizational impediments, not technical ones! Keep this in mind as you encourage your Scrum team to self-manage obstacles. Show others in the organization better ways to ensure the quality and safety organizations strive for in production.

Use PBIs to experiment with team members' ideas. As the Product Owner orders an experiment in the backlog and brings it into the Sprint, teams measure the experiment's impact toward continuous delivery. Continue to use the framework to your advantage to achieve Continuous Delivery. This is doable, teams, don't be afraid to use Scrum and Experiment toward Continuous Delivery!

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