Scrum And Continuous Delivery

I often here “You can’t do Scrum and Continuous Delivery”. It’s a clear message of “sorry, I haven’t really understood Scrum deeper than pure mechanical Scrum”.

Scrum does put a lower boundary on how often you should have a Done, potentially releaseable (product) increment. Once per sprint, at least. There’s nothing saying your Definition of Done can’t include this:

  • Solution Peer Reviewed
  • Solution Is Live, In Production

Does everyone have to do this in order to do Scrum? No! But there’s nothing limiting you from doing this either, and in fact, there are many companies that does this.

Example One

Hendrik Beck describes in a blog post a journey from mechanical Scrum, to CD. It starts with outlining mini-waterfall: “we’re ending the sprint with regression tests, release preparations, sprint review, a final sign-off, and the release”. That’s certainly one way of doing Scrum, but it’s not what we from Scrum.org teach - we don’t see that setup as Professional Scrum.

In short, most of what they do would be considered Professional Scrum, although it’d be interesting to see how they don’t delay integration when working with branches. I know it’s possible, but typically expensive and noisy.

Example Two

Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Gfader has a whitepaper on Scrum with CD. You can find it linked in this scrum.org blog entry.

End notes

Both of the linked articles where written before the 2013 update to the Scrum Guide and things have been moving fast in the CD space, with DevOps being promoted left and right. So don’t be surprised if a few things seems out of date.

This work by Fredrik Wendt is licensed under CC by-sa.