We all know a good agile organisation, or at least we’ve all heard about them, where everyone just *gets it*, they’re agile through-and-through, from the top down, bottom up, agile in the middle, and everyone’s a mini Martin Fowler. Yay for them.

We’ve also heard about these DevOps companies, who are leveraging automation in every step of their delivery pipeline. And they’re deploying to production 8,000 times a day with zero downtime and they rebuild their live VMs every 12 seconds. Great work.

Unfortunately the rest of the world sits outside those two extremes (recall Rogers Diffusion of Innovation Curve, principally the early and late majority). A lot of organisations simply don’t know what Agile and DevOps are, where they’ve come from, what the point is, and most importantly, how to do it.

So here’s what happens:

• To become agile they “go scrum” and hire a scrum master or ten
• To be “DevOps” they automate their environments and deployments

Why do they do this? I suspect it’s a number of reasons, but largely it’s because there’s a shit tonne of material out there that supports the view that Scrum is the best agile framework and DevOps means automating stuff.

The results are fairly predictable:

If you “do scrum” instead of understanding agile, you get what’s called Agile Cargo Cult. That basically ends up with people doing all these great scrum practices and ceremonies, but things don’t actually improve, and eventually they start to get worse, so to rectify the situation, teams apply the scrum ceremonies and practices with even greater rigour. Obviously this gets them nowhere, and eventually people within the organisation start to believe “Agile doesn’t work here”, blissfully unaware that they were never actually “agile” in the first place.

Organisations who think DevOps is about automating the Ops tasks just end up “slinging shit quicker”. If you don’t sort out the real problems in your system, you’re basically just making localised optimisations. There’s just no point. If your problem is that your software is hard to run, scale, operate and maintain – don’t try to automate your deployments.

Also, many DevOps initiatives, in my experience, are either driven by Dev, or Ops, but not usually both. And that says it all really.

So, for a lot of organisations who are new to this whole Agile and DevOps thing, there’s clearly an easy path sucking a lot of people in. And that’s a shame, because it results in a lot of frustration. It would be easy to laugh at these organisations, but it’s not their fault. Scrum has become a self-serving framework, seemingly more interested in its own popularity than its effectiveness, and DevOps is anything to anyone.

So, in summary, don’t do scrum, be agile. And don’t confuse DevOps with automating the Ops work.