Part I
Scrumdamentals
The chapters in this section establish a baseline understanding of the three areas that every Professional Scrum practitioner using Microsoft’s DevOps tools must know:
■ Scrum, and more specifically, Professional Scrum
■ Microsoft Azure DevOps (broadly)
■ Microsoft Azure Boards (specifically)
I begin by looking at Scrum and the rules of Scrum. The focus is on how and when a Developer interacts with the Product Owner and Scrum Master, participates in the various Scrum events, and interacts with the various Scrum artifacts. It’s important for all Developers to understand the rules of Scrum and what’s expected of them and their team, as well as when and how they should interact with the Product Owner, Scrum Master, stakeholders, and various artifacts.
Note In the 2020 Scrum Guide, the Development Team role was replaced with the Developer role. The goal was to eliminate the concept of a separate team within a team that led to “proxy” or “us and them” behavior between the Product Owner and Development Team. There is now just one team—the Scrum Team—and it is focused on the same objective, with three different sets of accountabilities: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers. Remember, Scrum recognizes a tester, coder, designer, architect, analyst, database professional, technical writer as simply . . . a Developer.
The remaining chapters in this section are more technical in nature and cover the tools found in Azure DevOps, specifically Azure Boards. I focus on the cloud-hosted Azure DevOps Services, rather than the on-premises Azure DevOps Server. Although many DevOps tools are available to a Scrum Team, I endeavor to list and discuss only those relevant to practicing Professional Scrum. I also point out which shiny tools are better left in the toolbox, allowing the team to exercise higher-valued collaborative practices instead. After all, we value individuals and interactions over process and tools, right?