DevOps methodology is quickly gaining traction in the IT world. It helps businesses streamline their software development and operations processes, leading to faster delivery, improved quality, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Over 99% of businesses claim that DevOps had a positive impact on their productivity. However, the key to DevOps success lies in collaboration between DevOps teams. Without it, your efforts to implement DevOps practices may fall short, resulting in siloed workflows and miscommunication.
This article is your ultimate guide to DevOps teams and the benefits of their strong relationships.
DevOps is a software engineering approach, quite different from SRE, that aims to combine your development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. Typically, DevOps teams comprise developers, system administrators, quality assurance engineers, and other IT professionals. They work together to speed up the software delivery process and increase organizational efficiency.
There are plenty of benefits of DevOps team structure. You see a better understanding of business goals, quicker issue identification and resolution, and better software quality. Let’s discuss all these in detail:
#1. Improved Collaboration and Communication Between Dev and Ops
Your initiatives will fail without proper collaboration between the Dev and Ops teams. However, a strong DevOps team culture paves the way for seamless communication and cooperation.
Your development and operations teams engage in discussion through regular meetings and work together to identify and address issues and share insights. They coordinate their efforts effectively, leading to more innovation and responsiveness in the organization.
#2. Shared Understanding of Goals and Challenges
Your DevOps teams need to understand the business goals and challenges to align their efforts effectively. A strong DevOps team structure provides exactly that. It creates a shared understanding of objectives and obstacles across all team members.
It also ensures everyone is on the same page and is working towards common goals with a unified approach. Hence, resulting in a cohesive work environment.
#3. Faster Problem Identification and Resolution
Software issues can happen at any time due to various factors, such as code changes or unexpected user behaviour. But the time you take to tackle the issue matters the most. A strong DevOps team culture is a great help in this regard.
It allows for faster problem identification via continuous monitoring and automated testing. This enables the DevOps teams to diagnose and implement fixes promptly, leading to happy and satisfied customers.
#4. Increased Agility and Speed of Delivery
The business world is experiencing rapid growth, and to stay ahead, you must deliver products quickly. Strong DevOps teams also significantly enhance agility and speed of delivery.
How? These teams leverage automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to streamline workflows and reduce bottlenecks. As a result, your business has quick time to market and maintains a competitive edge.
#5. Automation of Tasks like Testing and Deployment
A strong DevOps team structure allows you to fully utilize automated testing tools like Selenium, Jenkins, and Jira. These tools help run comprehensive and consistent tests across various environments so new codes are validated quickly. In addition, DevOps teams can also tend to automated deployment processes, ensuring new features and updates are rolled out without any manual intervention.
#6. Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) Pipelines
Continuous integration and delivery pipelines are crucial for maintaining an efficient development process. Robust DevOps teams ensure these two pillars are well-implemented and maintained. These teams work together to create and monitor CI/CD pipelines so defects are identified early on and the final software is delivered frequently without any issues.
#7. Enhanced software quality and reliability
You don’t only need to deliver software solutions swiftly but also ensure they are high-quality. Good bonding in DevOps teams guarantees this. They collaborate closely to create software that fulfills customer needs and integrates quality assurance in each stage of the development cycle. The purpose is to deliver reliable products free of issues like lagging or frequent crashes.
#8. Emphasis on Feedback Loops and Continuous Improvement
Strong DevOps team structure emphasizes feedback loops and continuous improvement. Your DevOps teams gather and analyze feedback from all software lifecycle stages, including development, testing, and deployment. They identify areas for improvement and combine efforts to innovate continuously and deliver superior software solutions.
#9. Improved Team Morale and Ownership
When you focus on creating a strong DevOps team structure, you take a significant step toward increasing team morale and ownership. It’s because your development and operations teams connect closely and gain a deeper understanding of each other’s responsibilities and challenges. They feel respect towards each other, which results in a supportive environment where everyone feels motivated and takes ownership of their tasks.
#10. Shared Responsibility for the Entire Software Lifecycle
A top-notch DevOps team structure results in an engaging workspace where everyone shares responsibility for the entire software lifecycle. This means that if any issue arises, instead of getting into a blame game, everyone mutually accepts their fault and immediately starts working towards a solution. It allows for more accountability and effective problem-solving, which are necessary for business success.
Businesses using traditional software engineering techniques have their operation and development teams working separately. This siloed team structure comes with many challenges, such as:
Communication Gaps
When teams work separately without proper communication channels, there are significant communication gaps. They don’t get to share work ideas and exchange their views on crucial aspects of the project.
Key information regarding particular projects also remains confined within specific groups. This leads to poor planning, misunderstandings, and frustration among team members, ultimately hampering the project’s overall progress.
Slow Release Cycles
Another issue with siloed teams is that they slow down software release cycles. How? Well, there’s a lack of coordination and collaboration between development and operations teams. This means they will have misaligned priorities, which indicates that each phase of the software cycle will take a long to complete. Hence, you fail to respond to market needs, putting your business at a competitive disadvantage.
Finger Pointing
Siloed teams often have little respect and trust within the organization. Therefore, when an issue arises, the response is often finger-pointing rather than collaborative problem-solving. This lack of accountability not only delays issue resolution but also deteriorates team morale and productivity.
Reduced Ownership and Accountability
In siloed teams, no one takes ownership of tasks beyond their immediate responsibilities. Everyone is focused on their individual roles instead of investing in the overall success of the project. Consequently, the end product lacks quality and often falls short of expectations, impacting customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
DevOps teams are made up of various professionals, including developers, operation managers, security experts, and QAs. Let’s discuss their role in detail:
If you are all set to create your own DevOps teams, there are different types of DevOps team structures you can explore. You can either opt for a cross-functional team setup or have centralized DevOps teams.
Let’s discuss these options in detail:
In a cross-functional team setup, professionals from different disciplines, including developers, operations, QA, and security, work together within the same team. This results in a close-knit workspace environment where everyone works towards the same goals, leading the company to success.
In the embedded DevOps engineers model, DevOps engineers are assigned or embedded into different software development teams. To put it simply, each development team will have its own DevOps engineer who incorporates the best DevOps practices into the software development process.
A centralized DevOps team is an independent unit that partners with other software development teams. It provides guidance to multiple development teams for consistent implementation of DevOps practices across the organization.
In a distributed DevOps team structure, DevOps engineers are distributed across multiple development teams. They aren’t embedded in any team, instead they work collaboratively with several teams from different geographical locations, providing them DevOps support as needed.
Building your DevOps teams is pretty straightforward. To have the best teams for your organization, you should focus on factors like each professional’s skill set and knowledge of automation tools.
Start by identifying professionals with the right skills and experience for DevOps teams. Look for individuals with a strong background in software development, system administration, and quality assurance. Ensure your team has a mix of senior and junior members for a perfect balance of experience and innovation.
For the success of DevOps, your teams should understand shared culture, collaboration, and mutual respect. So, pick professionals who focus on breaking down silos and prefer open communication regarding different topics. This creates a cohesive and engaging workspace.
Proper knowledge of automation tools is critical for a DevOps team. Ensure the team members you choose are familiar with various tools and their usage throughout the product life cycle. Some common automation tools include Jenkins, GitLab, Jira, and Circle CI.
The DevOps framework continuously evolves, with new technologies and practices being introduced. Therefore, it is more necessary than ever to have a team committed to continuous learning and improvement. They should also stay updated with the latest industry trends and utilize them to yield the best results.
Creating structured DevOps teams requires a lot of effort and time. So, if you want someone to manage your DevOps initiatives, Hicron Software House is the ultimate stop. We have an exceptional team of DevOps professionals who work together to develop and deploy software solutions while maintaining the highest quality standards. Get in touch with us today to reach the full potential of your DevOps methodology.
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