Once upon a time at bol.com, the biggest online retailer in the Netherlands, the IT department was split in Operations and Scrum teams. As we grew in size and we moved towards continuous delivery, the necessity for a more DevOps approach arised. We saw that we can benefit to get closer to each other, which resulted in splitting operations into SRTs (Space Reliability Teams) that worked closer to the Scrum teams. However, there is a lot of diversity in the Scrum teams, people with different backgrounds; testers, information analysts, database developers, java developers, newbies. Sometimes, it even felt we don’t even speak the same language with OPs.

This language barrier is causing confusion, frustration, and even delays in solving issues, simply because there is not enough insight in to what we do and know. After a very productive evening of drinks, we decided to tackle a part of this; the communication between our SRT (OPs) and our guys & girls from the Scrum teams (DEVs). To do this, we, three struggling developers that dare to dream, created documentation on all kinds of stuff that we did not understand in, as we say in dutch, Jip-en-Janekketaal (simple understandable language). Consequently, we bothered those people who do know about it and documented it. After that we wanted to share what we learnt and enlighten our colleagues that were still in the dark that this was the way to go.

For this purpose, we piloted with 9 Scrum teams and 2 SRTs, and measured with a questionnaire the situation before and after using the documentation. We would like to share this journey and the result with you… So stay tuned!