2101 02361 DevOps Team Structures: Characterization and Implications

Your team should be self-contained and work should happen with immediate teammates to ensure fast delivery. Beyond work scope, minimal hand-offs can also take the form of automated processes. Automating your development cycle ensures that moving things along is a seamless process, regardless if the next step is an action like an automated test or merge to main, or an actual human.

Thirdly, decentralizing decision-making enables the team to share DevOps responsibilities across the board while allowing them to expedite processes. The leader should ideally be a role model, show integrity, create a trustworthy environment and inspire others to follow that path. DevOps teams are ideally led by a senior member of the organization who knows business processes, has the technical expertise, and interacts with all employees. The leader should have a clear vision and articulate the vision across the team, drive intent, inspire, motivate and encourage everyone. Seamless collaboration and engagement help everyone not only to be motivated but align with organizational objectives. DevOps practices come and go as they are put to a test against real-life scenarios.

DevOps Structure 5: DevOps as an External Service

Start at the organization level, hire and manage the right talent required for the organization. Work at the team level, designing and structuring your processes, defining roles and responsibilities of DevOps teams, and choosing the right technology stack. Then go down to the individual level to touch every member of the team. The secret to success in a DevOps environment is gaining top-down buy-in across the organization.

Good QA engineers can also write efficient tests that run quickly and automatically. They should know the ins and outs of test automation frameworks, such as Selenium, and be skilled in how to write tests that cover a lot of ground but that don’t require a long time to run. They must also know how to interpret test results quickly and communicate to developers how to fix whatever caused the failure. Effective communication in this regard between developers and QA engineers is essential to maintain the CI/CD pipeline flow even when a test fails. Because automation is foundational to DevOps, choose systems that can be provisioned automatically.

Increasing efficiency of DevOps Teams

An example of how this looks in practice can be illustrated with one of our customers, Cox Automotive. The automobile dealer and buyer witnessed significant growth after acquiring over 20 companies. They had minimal IT resources and their DevOps practice was not as effective as expected. Cox Automotive wanted to build a DevOps team that encouraged both the creation and consumption of reusable assets––enabling the growing number of acquired companies to leverage assets effectively and securely. The Accelerate State of DevOps Report shows that you commonly find Platform Engineering teams in high-performance organizations.

The enabling team seeks to primarily increase the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by growing their capabilities with a focus on problems, rather than solutions. An enabling team composed of specialists in a given technical (or product) domain help bridge this capability gap. These teams focus on research and experimentation to make informed suggestions about tooling, frameworks, and ecosystem choices that affect the tool stack. Ideally, your DevOps strategy is powered by developers who have two main traits. They know a variety of programming languages and are familiar with different app development strategies, such as Agile methodology.

What is DevOps? The ultimate guide

A common pitfall is to embed specialists in every stream-aligned team who uses the subsystem. While this may seem efficient, it’s ultimately not cost-effective and out of scope for a stream-aligned team. However, the risk with devops team structure small teams means that getting all the required expertise might be a challenge, and loss of a team member might significantly impair the team’s throughput. A general agreement is that team sizes should range between 5 and 12.

Let’s explore the top five reasons why DevOps teams need code mapping. However, with the advent of DevOps and Agile methodologies, its importance has grown. We’ll discuss why code mapping can be a powerful tool for DevOps teams and how to best use it. Overall, the specific sub-roles within a DevOps team will depend on the needs and goals of the organization and may involve a combination of these and other roles. Netflix and Facebook – companies developing one digital product – are prime examples of companies using and succeeding with this DevOps practice.

DevOps Engineer vs Software Engineer: What is the Difference?

QA being dependent on CI, continuous monitoring becomes an integral part of every stage of the product life cycle. The current monitoring tools are not just confined to production environments but they also proactively monitor the entire app stack. When monitoring is integrated into the DevOps lifecycle, tracking DevOps KPIs becomes easy, and app deployments become efficient. It also facilitates seamless collaboration between development and operations teams. With Quality Engineering and Quality Assurance going hand in hand, QA teams are happier now as quality is not just their job, but it turns into DevOps Team responsibility. DevOps is an innovative methodology that offers a set of practices that brings development and operations teams together to collaborate seamlessly and continuously to deliver quality products faster and better.

Because stream-aligned teams work on the full spectrum of delivery, they are, by necessity, closer to the customer and usually already agile. This team incorporates customer feedback in development cycles, while maintaining software in production. Not everyone will understand what DevOps means or why the organization should invest in the new tools, processes and people necessary to support it. QA engineers focus specifically on how to define quality standards for performance, reliability and other factors before software is pushed into production. It is their responsibility to design and run tests that assess whether each new release meets those requirements as it flows through the CI/CD pipeline.

DevOps Roles: Release Manager

To enact DevSecOps, an organization must set up tools and processes that enable developers, security engineers and IT professionals to participate in security operations. All three groups of stakeholders should have visibility into security problems so that they can counter those problems in a collaborative manner. Likewise, developers should be prepared to communicate with security engineers early and often to help design code that is secure from the start. IT engineers should work closely with the security team to ensure that their deployment and management processes follow best practices with regard to application and infrastructure security.

In pursuit of this goal, mature teams should use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to ship features frequently. Platform teams enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. While the stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing an application in production, the platform team provides internal services that the stream-aligned team can use.

DevOps Team Structure and Best Practice

We have a reliability group that manages uptime and reliability for GitLab.com, a quality department, and a distribution team, just to name a few. The way that we make all these pieces fit together is through our commitment to transparency and our visibility through the entire SDLC. But we also tweak (i.e. iterate on) this structure regularly to make everything work. A solid DevOps platform needs a solid DevOps team structure to achieve maximum efficiency. And appoint a liaison to the rest of the company to make sure executives and line-of-business leaders know how DevOps is going, and so dev and ops can be part of conversations about the top corporate priorities. Even though DevOps is arguably the most efficient way to get software out the door, no one actually ever said it’s easy.

• After hardening is done, teams should verify if it meets the baseline and then continuously monitor it to avoid deviations.
• Not only is it cost-effective but the knowledge they possess and share with others will be an added advantage.
• The concept of DevOps, however, has its roots in earlier approaches to software development, such as agile software development and the practice of integrating development and operations teams.
• This is not to say that every employee in your organization needs to know the ins and outs of DevOps and software requirements.
• They can also undergo automated or manual regression, performance, system or integration tests.
• Teams entrenched in siloed ways of working can struggle with, or even be resistant to, overhauling team structures to embrace DevOps practices.