DevOps and Team culture

DevOps is not just about tools; it is more about team culture. It is good idea to ensure that teams understands that the tools are simply means that supplements the processes that teams need to follow.

Implementing DevOps

Some key aspects to keep in mind about team culture while implementing DevOps are as follows:

Create collaborative environment

It is critical that all teams involved in DevOps understand the need to work in a collaborative environment thus giving up working in silos, communicating effectively and in timely manner, and ensuring that other teams are kept in loop regarding relevant changes. Any tool in itself can only facilitate collaboration. However, teams who use such tools need to use it effectively from a perspective to collaborate. For e.g. any change to a production environment needs to be implemented with minimal disruption to production environment.

Discover team leaders

Finding leaders who are committed to DevOps at team level is the key to success of DevOps implementation. This means leaders who understand the role that all teams play for e.g. development, QA as well as operations are required for such an implementation. Such leaders are likely to be collaborative across teams, and will get the job done in quickest possible time. DevOps implementation needs a lot of investment in tools to automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, automated testing and deployment of code etc. The value of such investment can only be realized if there are leaders of teams who are willing to work in collaboration for successful investment. This also means clear definition of roles and responsibilities across teams.

Rules of engagement

All rules of engagement need to be openly discussed, defined and then frozen. Team’s mission needs to be clearly defined and shared with each member of the team. Ensuring that all information is available to each team member ahead of time, to get his/her work is done will ensure that each team member is aware of what is expected of him/her, can visualize and complete the work. Such open communication generally fosters collaboration as dependency of each team member on another is highlighted clearly and communicated upfront.

Culture of learning

It is important that the team implementing DevOps adopts a culture of learning such that it is constantly improving, on all of its key metrics. For e.g. one of the metrics as a number could be new defects introduced in production with each release, should keep going down in general as team learns how to ensure smoother implementation of changes. Transparency will be key for team to have a shared learning on how to improve on a continuous basis.

Accountability

As with all projects, it is critical to ensure there is accountability at least at team level if not at individual level. Accountability does not necessarily mean finding out who caused the problem. It means that team members are more focussed on mitigating risks and solving problems before it manifests.

Conclusion

In short, the larger DevOps team should not have fear of introducing a change into production as it will be focussed on continuously improving processes and quality. This can be achieved by a robust team with collaborative team culture.