DevOps and Scrum

I do not often see DevOps being well practiced with Scrum. To me, DevOps means doing all the infrastructure, monitoring, performance testing and releasing (etc.) from within the Scrum team itself. This means you need the skills on the team whether they are developers themselves (which typically for me has worked very, very well) or at the least having someone(s) devoted to DevOps on the team as a regular working member, not off in some operations group hidden behind a service request system.

In large organizations this may seem like an impossible challenge to make happen. I do not see it this way, they only thing in the way is politics and that is solvable. A great many teams suffer because they do not have DevOps skills on the team, they suffer, and the company suffers because this is not the way to a quality product (with quality built in from the start). This is a way to silo expertise which results in products which have to be fixed after they are created or even after they are deployed.

While we do not live in a perfect world where having DevOps on the Scrum team will solve all problems, it solves so many that it is without question worthwhile to pursue, even in large organizations.