Agile Beyond Scrum

Aside from scrum being a rigid process, and therefore not agile, adoption of scrum is essentially adoption of a 20-year-old agile, where sprints are 2-8 weeks (like the agile manifesto says). But agile has evolved since then, especially since the advent of DevOps.

With DevOps/CI/CD sprints don't make sense at all. We should be deploying our code changes multiple times per day to the production environment; or at most a week. The iterations are such micro iterations sprints just don't make any sense anymore.

Deploy to prod from day one, and never stop. The side effect is that your agility goes through the roof. There are no sprints that you have to complete before changing what's next. There's no bureaucracy and no gatekeepers, just the team. If you made some changes a few minutes ago, deployed them, and now priorities have changed, then move on to that new priority.

The first Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is defined as done when users have started using the production version. In other words, it's providing enough value to warrant actually using it. The team's focus should always be the MVP from day one. If that is the focus, it will continue to be the focus throughout the life of the product.