Originally reported by SD Times. This article summarises the ScrumOps announcement made jointly by Scrum.org and the DevOps Institute.
What Is ScrumOps?
Scrum.org and the DevOps Institute announced a collaborative initiative called ScrumOps, a delivery model designed to bring Scrum and DevOps practices together inside a single coherent framework. The goal is to help IT organisations move beyond siloed ways of working and into a continuous, measurable, and governed software delivery pipeline.
ScrumOps is positioned as applicable to any IT organisation, regardless of size or current maturity level. According to the two organisations, it is intended to address a persistent industry perception that Scrum and DevOps are in tension with each other — and to demonstrate that, in practice, they are complementary.
The Problem: Water-Scrum-Fall
A common anti-pattern in software delivery is what practitioners call water-scrum-fall: teams adopt Scrum ceremonies in the development phase but retain waterfall-style handoffs to operations, QA, and release management. The result is that agility is constrained to one slice of the value stream while the surrounding processes remain slow and manual.
Dave West, CEO and product owner of Scrum.org, articulated the problem directly:
“I believe that without agile, DevOps lacks direction, as agile is the heartbeat of empiricism and places focus on inspection and adaptation. 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.”
Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org
How Scrum and DevOps Complement Each Other
Rather than viewing Scrum and DevOps as competing methodologies, ScrumOps treats them as operating at different layers of the delivery system:
- Scrum provides the lightweight, empirical framework for planning, executing, and reviewing increments of working software through time-boxed sprints and defined roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team).
- DevOps provides the automation, tooling, cultural practices, and operational disciplines — CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and feedback loops — that make frequent, reliable delivery possible.
- ScrumOps integrates the two so that empiricism governs the entire value stream, not just the development phase.
West also addressed a common misconception about the Scrum Guide: many practitioners believe Scrum restricts teams to releasing only one increment per sprint. In reality, the Scrum Guide specifies only that teams must produce at least one shippable increment per sprint — it does not prohibit more frequent releases. DevOps automation makes multiple releases within a sprint not only possible but practical.
End-to-End Organisational Alignment
Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute, described the broader organisational impact of ScrumOps:
“When we bring the practices and ideologies of Scrum and DevOps together, we can truly shape the end-to-end IT organisation. This new model shows how business, development, delivery, security and operations fit together to support continuous value in a governed way.”
Jayne Groll, CEO, DevOps Institute
This framing is significant: ScrumOps explicitly includes security and governance as first-class concerns within the delivery model, aligning with the DevSecOps movement that was gaining momentum at the time of the announcement.
People Over Tools — Revisiting the Agile Manifesto
West highlighted a concern common to mature Agile and DevOps adoptions: organisations often over-invest in toolchains while under-investing in the cultural and human dimensions. The Agile Manifesto’s first value — individuals and interactions over processes and tools — is frequently overlooked once organisations begin scaling tooling platforms.
ScrumOps, by grounding delivery in Scrum’s empirical model of inspect-and-adapt, keeps the focus on team learning and collaboration rather than on any specific tool implementation.
Planned Training and Community Collaboration
As part of the initiative, Scrum.org and the DevOps Institute announced plans to collaborate on joint content, workshops, and training resources. West described the announcement as the beginning of an ongoing effort:
“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 organisations together to improve how they do what they do.”
Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
- Scrum and DevOps are not mutually exclusive. Scrum governs the what and when of delivery; DevOps governs the how.
- The Scrum Guide does not cap release frequency. Teams can and should release more than once per sprint when DevOps pipelines support it.
- Water-scrum-fall is a real risk. Agile ceremonies alone do not produce continuous delivery — operational automation and cultural change are also required.
- Security and governance belong inside the delivery model, not bolted on at the end.
- Empiricism is the shared foundation. Both Scrum and DevOps rely on measuring outcomes and adapting — ScrumOps makes that feedback loop explicit across the entire value stream.
For teams currently operating in a water-scrum-fall pattern, ScrumOps offers a structured rationale for extending agile thinking beyond the development team and into operations, security, and release management.