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Conceptualized by the Scrum agile framework, a sprint designates a project cycle during which a certain number of tasks will follow one another in order to achieve a new phase of development of a product.

As its name indicates, an agile sprint is a sequential phase in the development of a product. By sprint we mean short iterations that break down an often complex development process to make it simpler and easier to readapt and improve according to the results of intermediate evaluations (see diagram below).

In the logic of agile methods, the objective is to start small and then improve the first version of a product by small iterations. This avoids taking too much risk. We get out of the tunnel effect of V-cycle projects that are cut into successive phases of analysis, specification, design, coding and testing. These projects are characterized by a single delivery at the end of the process, with no intermediate return visits to the business users. As a result, the product may no longer meet the needs of the field, which may have changed in the meantime.

Working in successive development sprints has several advantages. First, this process offers better control of the added value and quality of the final product or service. The iterations allow us to rectify the situation at any time according to customer feedback. As the first product is launched quickly, the return on investment is also often faster.

In the end, the sprint mode contributes to increasing customer satisfaction, whether they are internal users of the product or final customers. The latter feels taken into account throughout the development process.

As a general rule, the duration of a sprint varies between one and four weeks. The duration of each cycle will depend on the tasks defined as priorities and the time deemed necessary by the members of the project team to complete them. A sprint aims to achieve a single, specific product development objective.

If the notion of a sprint is well known to teams of developers, it is because it is the cornerstone of Scrum, the most widely used agile framework today. Hence the term “Scrum sprint”. In this method, the time frame of a sprint is determined in consultation with the members of the project team.

But Scrum is not the only agile method to rely on short development iterations. Other agile methods such as Extreme programming, Feature-driven development or Crystal Clear also work with rapid development cycles equivalent to sprints.

The four steps of the agile sprint

1. Sprint planning

The sprint planning is the first step of a sprint. It is a fairly codified event during which the development cycle is organized and the objectives to be achieved are clearly stated. The information relating to the development process must be known by all the members in order to facilitate their communication.

2. The daily meeting

The daily scrum meeting is an intermediate meeting that takes place during the sprint. It brings together the members of the development team. Objective: to update the plan to reach the objective according to what has been done.

Not to exceed 15 minutes, the daily scrum meeting is also an opportunity to discuss difficulties. If a debate is launched on a blocking point, it is then recommended to plan a meeting dedicated to the question and limited to the people concerned.

3. The sprint review

At the end of each sprint, a sprint review is organized so that the development team can present the increments brought to the product under development.

The meeting is an opportunity to review the progress of the product. Is it still in phase with the business needs? Is it necessary to make any adaptations? During the sprint review, the scope of the next sprint is also discussed.

4 The sprint retrospective

The sprint retrospective takes place after each sprint review. Business users are generally not invited. It provides the development team with a space for exchanging lessons learned during the sprint, and for working on ways to improve processes and tools. It is also an opportunity to review the relationships between team members and any problems that may have been encountered.

In agile language, the sprint retrospective is part of the principle of continuous improvement. The objective is for the next sprint to be more efficient than the previous one and so on. It is an empirical method, i.e. based on experience and self-learning.

The sprint backlog is not addressed by the Scrum framework. It is nevertheless widely used, even if it is not recommended because it is rather heavy to set up. It consists of gathering all the user stories (i.e. functional requests from business users) that the development team has committed to completing during a sprint. The progress of these requests will be represented on a kanban board (or scrum board). Each team member will thus have a common vision of the current sprint.

There are several types of user stories: development of functionalities, technical environments, bug fixes, etc. These are the finest units of work. They are always described from the point of view of the end user. They therefore relate the developer’s unit of work to the added value he or she will provide in the end.

Where the agile sprint refers to product development cycles, the design sprint refers to the upstream creation process. Inspired by design thinking, its purpose is to scrutinize a maximum number of ideas in a team. Generally lasting five days, it allows to quickly validate a product or service concept. The goal is to come up with one or two prototypes that will then be tested on real users on the last day.

Capitalizing on collective intelligence, sprint design aims to respond quickly to a business problem by defining a clear and proven product policy, accompanied by a development roadmap. Ultimately, the logic is obviously to accelerate the time to market while reducing the commercial risk. The main fundamentals of the design sprint: multidisciplinary team, unity of time and place, rapid prototyping and testing in real conditions.

Overview of the agile project management framwork Scrum, and its main pillars and values: Sprint scrum, scrum master, product owner, daily scrum meeting, scrum board…

What is the Scrum method?

Scrum is the most widely used agile framework. Like other agile methods, Scrum is a project management approach that makes the customer (or user) the main driver of the team in charge of developments. Historically, it is mainly implemented in the IT domain, and in the application development domain in particular. However, it is also used more and more in other areas of product engineering.

The term “scrum” means “scrimmage” and is openly inspired by rugby, a sport that requires a close-knit team moving in the same direction. In the Scrum Method, a “scrum” is a sprint. This means a development phase of one to four weeks that aims to focus the project team on a limited part of the product or service to be delivered. Typically, it will be a matter of concretizing some functionalities in the case of an application. At the end of each sprint, a sprint review is organized to review the progress of the project with the members of the project team, to examine the possible adaptations to be made, and to identify the objectives of the next sprint (see the infographic below).

What is the main contribution of Scrum?

Like other agile methods, the main advantage of Scrum is that it quickly leads to a first iteration of a product or service that can be used in the field. Validated progressively by the customer, the following sprints allow to enrich this first base. Result: project management becomes a much more productive process.

Gone is the tunnel effect of V-cycle projects that start with the analysis of requirements and then move on to specification, design, coding and testing. Projects that are characterized by a single delivery at the end of the process that may no longer fit with the business issues that will have evolved in the meantime.

What is a scrum sprint?

The sprint is the centerpiece of the Scrum agile method. Hence the commonly used name of sprint scrum. Sprints are short development iterations designed to create a product or service in an incremental way.

What are the 3 pillars of Scrum?

Scrum determines a framework to facilitate the rapid and efficient implementation of a development project. To successfully apply this framework, Scrum recommends three fundamental pillars :

• Transparency. It aims to ensure that the stakeholders (project team, management and users) share a common language and benefit from all the information necessary to understand the project.
• Inspection. The purpose of inspection is to check, through regular evaluations, that the development is still in line with the customer’s requirements and that it does not deviate from them.
• Adaptation. A concept that lives up to its name. Its objective? To correct the project’s trajectory if deviations from the results to be achieved are detected during the inspection phase.

What are the five values of Scrum?

To these three pillars, the Scrum infrastructure adds five values aimed at making the work effective and the collaboration between the actors in presence fluid and in line with the objectives to be achieved:

• Focus. The project team must be fully focused on the development to be achieved.
• Openness. The project team as well as the management must be open to the Scrum way of working, in particular to interpersonal communication to move forward and solve problems together.
• Respect. All stakeholders (project team members, management and customers) must show mutual respect.
• Courage. Finally, the project team must have the courage to meet the challenges it will face independently.
• Commitment. This is a value that also contributes to the success of the process. Scrum team members must be personally committed to achieving the goals of each sprint.

Focus, openness, respect, courage and commitment form the acronym Force which illustrates the purpose sought through these four core values by the Scrum agile method.

What are the 6 principles of Scrum?

In addition to its three pillars and these five values, Scrum puts forward five operational principles:

• Empirical process control,
• Autonomy and self-organization of the team.
• Collaboration.
• Prioritization or value-based prioritization.
• Due dates,
• Iterative development.

What is the role of the scrum master?

Scrum recommends appointing what it calls a scrum master. His role is to guarantee the implementation of the agile framework and to manage the four stages of a scrum sprint: planning, daily meeting, sprint review and sprint retrospective. The scrum master is a central element for the smooth running of the project team and is also the guarantor of the fluidity of exchanges and the productivity of work. As such, he/she identifies blocking points and leads brainstorming sessions to identify solutions. Finally, he/she writes the burndown chart (BDC) that describes the volume of tasks remaining to be completed on the vertical axis and the projected timing on the horizontal axis.

Faced with these challenges, a scrum master is expected to master the Scrum infrastructure. He or she must also demonstrate pedagogy and opt for a participative management style based on coaching. From this point of view, the role of srcum master will most often be assigned to the project manager.

What is the salary of a scrum master?

The salary of a scrum master is higher than that of an average IT project manager. Indeed, a scrum master is expected to combine the skills of a project manager with those of a coach and team leader. All this combined with an excellent knowledge of Scrum.

The scrum master can have acquired the mastery of the Scrum method by practice or by following a training leading to a scrum master certification.

What is the role of the product owner?

Alongside the scrum master, Scrum advises to appoint a product owner. His mission? Representing the customer within the project team, he is the guarantor of the product vision. He is responsible for feeding the project backlog with items or business functionalities to be implemented, with detailed specifications for each one. In Scrum language, these items are called user stories. They describe the customer’s needs in simple language that can be understood by all stakeholders.

Within the backlog, the product owner prioritizes the user stories according to four criteria: the business value introduced, the technical and business knowledge required for implementation (need for training?), the effort to be produced by the project team, and the risks, i.e. the associated constraints that may generate imponderables (technical and business prerequisites, solicitation of a supplier, etc.)

The product owner’s mission is therefore to integrate both the users’ requests and the technical constraints linked to the implementation. At each stage of the project, or sprint, he is responsible for presenting the work done to the customer. He/she analyses the feedback with the project team to ensure that the product or service developed corresponds to the client’s expectations and that it remains within the budget. To facilitate user feedback, Scrum recommends setting up user tests at the end of each sprint.

What is a daily scrum meeting or daily scrum?

The daily scrum is a meeting that takes place during a sprint. It allows each member of the project team to review the tasks completed the day before and those to be completed during the day. It is organized in front of the scrum board, which takes stock of the current sprint.

Not to exceed 15 minutes, the daily scrum meeting is also an opportunity to discuss blocking points and possible solutions to resolve them. If a debate is launched on a thorny issue, Scrum advises to plan a meeting dedicated to the subject and limited to the people concerned.

What is a scrum board?

The scrum board (or scrum task board) is a board inspired by the Kanban method. It allows you to follow the progress of tasks within the current Scrum sprint.

Most often deployed on a whiteboard, the scrum task board is divided into at least three columns: tasks to do, tasks in progress and completed tasks. Squares of adhesive paper representing these tasks will be moved from one column to another as the sprint progresses. Depending on the needs, intermediate columns can be added (test, recipe…).

Originally Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are the authors of the Scrum Guide which lays the foundations of the agile method of the same name. Foundations, pillars, values, roles, meetings… It reviews the different concepts of the framework.

Independent from any software publisher or service provider, the Scrum Guide is available on the web. It can also be downloaded from Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland’s website (Scrum.org):

Originally, it was Ken Schwaber who laid the foundations of what would become the Scrum method during a conference in 1995. He then detailed the principles in an article published in 1996 in the Cutter Business Technology Journal (article entitled Controlled Chaos: Living on the Edge).

What are the missions of the Scrum Alliance?

Founded in 2001, the Scrum Alliance is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the agile movement through certifications. Led by members of the agile community, it fuels debate and research in this field.

What are the scrum master certifications?

There are several recognized certifications in this field. They aim to validate and label Scrum skills. Historically, the Scrum Alliance was the first non-profit organization to offer certification training in this field. There are three levels: Certified ScrumMaster, Advanced Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Professional ScrumMaster. The same logic applies to the product owener via Certified Scrum Product Owner, Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner and Certified Scrum Professional Product Owner.

In france, Agilbee, a training company specialized in agile methods, offers the Scrum Alliance courses and certifications in French. The Scrum League’s Scrum certifications are also available in French.

The main alternative to the Scrum Alliance’s offer is Scrum.org, which has also set up Scrum certifications, particularly through the Professional Scrum Master and Professional Scrum Product Owner programs. Available only in English, they have the advantage of having been designed directly by the authors of Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.

Scrum vs Kanban

Often put in competition, the Scrum and Kanban agile methods are much more complementary than they seem. The first aims to split product development processes into several cycles. The main objective of the latter is to limit the waste of time and energy by limiting the number of production tasks to be carried out.

While Scrum is adapted to the management of a single project, Kanban is better suited to the management of several projects or to TMA (third-party application maintenance) and MCO (maintenance in operational condition).

Scrum vs Safe

If Scrum remains the most popular agile method at the moment, it is followed by other methodologies that are more and more efficient in terms of agility. This is particularly true of the Scaled Agile Framework, more commonly known as Safe, which allows for more flexible work management in large companies.

Short for machine learning operations, MLOps aims to design learning models suitable for deployment in production and then maintain them throughout their lifecycle.

What is MLOps?

MLOps aims to design and maintain machine learning models that can be used in the field. Like DevOps for applications, it involves mastering their entire life cycle. The goal? To take into account deployment constraints from the design and training stages of the model. Following the logic of agile methods, MLOps takes shape through the implementation of learning pipelines combined with model monitoring tools.

The MLOPs engineer is the protagonist. This emerging profession is the product of a cross between the data scientist and the data engineer.

What are the building blocks of MLOps?

MLOps requires the implementation of several bricks aiming to drive the entire machine learning cycle:

• A reusable model store,
• A reusable feature store,
• A continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tool,
• A model monitoring and traceability tool,
• A collaborative environment.

What are the tools of MLOps?

Major MLOps tools include:

• DataiKu (proprietary application),
• DataRobot (proprietary application),
• Domino Data (proprietary application),
• Kubeflow (open source application created by Google),
• Metaflow (open source application),
• MLFlow (open source application),

On the cloud provider side, AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure all integrate the MLOps dimension into their respective machine learning platforms, Amazon SageMaker for the first, Vertex for the second and Azure Machine Learning for the third.

Several MLOps training modules are offered online and in science faculties or engineering schools. The MLOps engineer is above all a data scientist. A data scientist training is the key to enter the profession. They must also master the rules of programming and software engineering.

Datascientest is for the moment the only institute to offer a training in MLOps referenced on the Training Application, a training allowing consequently a financing via its training account.

MLOps vs DevOps

DevOps, a contraction of Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops), combines two essential functions: application development and system engineering. The challenge is to take into account deployment constraints from the programming phase and thus improve the quality of the finished product. MLOps is derived from DevOps, but more specifically addresses machine learning oriented applications.

IT organizations are under pressure to further reduce the cost of IT operations, increase service levels, stay compliant and reduce risk while improving visibility into financial and operational decisions. And they must do so with IT infrastructures that are more complex, hybrid and sophisticated than ever before.

Managing change, whether driven by business or functional requirements or operational reasons (lifecycle management, patching, risk management…), is becoming proportionately more complex. To cope, the IT department needs strong management disciplines supported by integrated tools. To be able to manage change safely, taking into account everyone’s requirements, it is necessary to arm oneself with the necessary information to make the right decision.

Managing IT changes

The introduction of agile delivery of digital solutions and DevOps workflows, combined with the adoption of native and public cloud-hosted cloud architectures, has also changed the role of the change management discipline. These are deployed at a much faster pace, almost continuously, and traditional change management concepts need to be rethought. In the agile world, pre-approved standard changes are becoming the norm rather than traditional changes in the traditional way of working. This does not mean that the control function of change management is no longer needed, but that understanding and visibility of all these changes becomes more important. This information requires automated change discovery and detection solutions that are integrated into the DevOps value stream.

The move to DevOps introduces an additional challenge with respect to operational changes: the use of infrastructure as code (IaC) by agile development teams – using provisioning tools such as Terraform, for example – leads to increased sprawl, opacity, and even compliance issues if not governed properly, as these teams will no longer use or only partially use the consumption and compliance pathways put in place by IT. Overcoming these challenges requires a governance solution that has safeguards around the use of IaC. These then ensure that the infrastructure changes applied by agile teams are tracked, including their costs and expenses against budget, and that these changes are valid in light of IT compliance rules.

Inventory assets for controlled change management

Managing changes to the physical, virtual, financial and contractual aspects of IT assets on-premises or in the public cloud requires robust inventory, IT asset management (ITAM), software asset management (SAM) and cloud financial management policies as part of a broader enterprise service management (ESM) solution for IT organizations. No one likes unexpected expenses or fines related to software usage. Organizations need to manage software licenses across all IT platforms, including those hosted in the public cloud, to moderate licensing costs and reduce the risk of non-compliance. An up-to-date inventory of hardware and software across all IT environments is an essential foundation and can only be achieved effectively and efficiently through automated discovery, cost tracking and change management.

Another salient issue is how IT can contribute to corporate environmental goals as part of its ESG policies. Accurate visibility into all IT assets and their relationships, preferably with integration data from data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools that monitor environmental metrics, can facilitate decision making for infrastructure consolidation, transformation, lifecycle management and more to reduce the carbon footprint.

Control and track

So, do we need to change? Absolutely. But change must be controlled, tracked and governed, and it must be done within the modern DevOps value stream. IT operations management solutions must provide the capabilities to do this: discover all hardware and software assets and their relationships, enable enterprise service management, including cloud design and deployment, ITAM and SAM. Support agile teams by providing continuous, real-time compliance and cost management for IaC-based changes. Service assurance and observability solutions further provide a feedback loop in the planning phase of the DevOps chain. This closes the loop and new changes can be undertaken.

In today’s agile way of working, IT change has become one of the “permanent” elements of the continuous everything paradigm, requiring constant visibility, cost tracking, and compliance validation.

Renowned chip designer Arm on Wednesday unveiled its next generation of data center chip technology. Dubbed Neoverse V2 and known by the codename “Demeter,” the new line of chips is meant to address the explosive growth of data from 5G and internet-connected gadgets. Arm’s platform includes the new V-series core and the CMN-700 mesh interconnect.

In the British designer’s traditional formula, Arm will create underlying intellectual property for this new generation of chips that other companies, such as Qualcomm or Apple, can adopt under license to create their own processor chips. In particular, Arm cites chip giant Nvidia’s latest Grace data center processor as being built using the Neoverse V2 design. “Grace will combine the power efficiency of V2 with the power efficiency of LPDDR5X memory to deliver twice the performance per watt of servers powered by traditional architectures,” Arm’s side argues.

As a reminder, Arm does not manufacture its own chips. The company does not have its own manufacturing facilities. Instead, it licenses its products to other companies, which it calls “partners. They use Arm’s architecture as a kind of template, building systems that use Arm’s cores as their core processors.

Many Samsung and Apple smartphones and tablets, and all devices with Qualcomm processors, use some of Arm’s intellectual property. For all that, while Arm’s technology powers most cell phones, it has made a strong push into data center processors, long dominated by Intel or AMD.