Scrum.org and the DevOps Institute are teaming up on ScrumOps, a new approach to software delivery. ScrumOps is designed to transform IT organizations into the next-generation, agile era of working by bringing Scrum and DevOps together.

According to the organizations, while some believe DevOps and Scrum don’t work well together, ScrumOps can be applied to any IT organization. It aims to provide a way for teams to continuously delivery secure and working software while measuring success.

“I believe that without agile, DevOps lacks direction, as agile is the heartbeat of empiricism and places focus on inspection and adaption. On the other hand, Scrum needs DevOps because it creates the foundation to help you scale by reducing the pain the Scrum team faces when releasing software. It’s time to finally stop water-scrum-fall,” said Dave West, CEO and product owner of Scrum.org.

Scrum provides a lightweight framework for delivering software. DevOps provides the automation, culture and practices to support that delivery. ScrumOps brings the two together with a focus on empiricism, West explained.

“When we bring the practices and ideologies of Scrum and DevOps together, we can truly shape the end-to-end IT organization,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute. “This new model shows how business, development, delivery, security and operations fit together to support continuous value in a governed way.”

West says there is a common myth in the agile community that Scrum only allows you to release an increment of working software once per sprint, however the Scrum Guide only says that teams must be able to deliver a minimum of one working increment, not that they can’t deliver more. In addition, West believes businesses and teams have forgotten that the Agile Manifesto puts emphasis on people, not tools.

“Both Scrum and DevOps have been proven to work, so bringing the thinking together from both will only make the teams better. We should stop thinking of a development team as working in one way and the operations teams working in a different way,” said West. “By using Scrum together with DevOps, we believe that lines of communication can open even more broadly and through the exact nature of Scrum being empirical, teams can keep learning, adapting and improving. We cannot let delivery get stagnant, we must keep improving and that is a big part of bringing DevOps and Scrum together in ScrumOps”

The two organizations have also agreed to collaborate on content, training and resources over the next couple of months. “This is just the start. We are working together to deliver workshops, training and in general to bring our communities of people who are out there every day dealing with difficult situations within their organizations together to improve how they do what they do. You can expect more to come from this combined effort,” West said.