The Importance of DevOps Team Structure

One technique is to embrace shift-right testing for noncritical features. This enables some tests to be performed after code is deployed, which reduces the number of tests that run pre-deployment and gets new releases into production faster. Organizations must build the DevOps team structure necessary to evangelize and implement key DevOps practices. Shana is a product marketer passionate about DevOps and what it means for teams of all shapes and sizes.

devops department structure

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. Continuous Delivery takes devops department structure the applications and delivers them to selected infrastructures. Testing moves towards the left part of the CI/CD pipeline, wherein code is automatically tested before delivering it to production.

DevOps practices

They act as a united front, with shared goals and unified product vision. Sometimes, this practice is also called “NoOps” as it does not assume having a segregated and visible Ops-team. Engaging with a reputable DevOps services provider makes perfect sense in this case. In this team structure, there are still separate dev and ops teams, but there is now a “DevOps” team that sits between, as a facilitator of sorts.

  • While the team operates autonomously most of the time, it will report to a pre-assigned senior member of the organization, ideally a DevOps evangelist, when required.
  • However, organizations cannot adopt these practices without building a DevOps team structure that facilitates these practices and other aspects of DevOps culture.
  • With Jira as the backbone, teams can use Atlassian products or bring their favorite products to the open toolchain.
  • It complements the DevOps team structure as every small change is efficiently handled.
  • This helped the methodology win universal acclaim in the high-tech realm.

A professional manager’s job is to build a team with a strong mix of skills with overlap while keeping the team as small as possible. You can use DevOps PATHS to detect common accidental team structures to fix and avoid long-term problems. The focus on products over projects is one hallmark of digital transformation. And as companies seek to be quicker in responding to evolving customer needs as well as fend off disruptors, the need to better manage the end-to-end product lifecycle has become a crucial differentiator. If you really want teams to be able to have shared responsibilities, they need to have common goals.

key DevOps roles and responsibilities for team success

This team structure is dependent on applications that run in a public cloud, since the IaaS team creates scalable, virtual services that the development team uses. Previously, the security of a solution was taken care of only upon development completion. With DevOps, security is integrated into the very principles of a software piece from its inception, which ushered the notion of DevSecOps. The best practices of this approach guarantee adherence to security compliance requirements throughout all stages of continuous delivery. Overall, the responsibilities of DevOps practitioners revolve around fostering a culture of agility, rapid iteration, and delivering customer value by aligning development and operations goals.

Still, the results are high-bandwidth information flow and increasingly brilliant collaboration. This doesn’t mean putting people together if they will regularly share information. The 2015 State of DevOps Report from Puppet Labs describes the characteristics of a “generative culture” that can succeed in implementing DevOps. Among the necessary traits are high cooperation through cross-functional teams, shared responsibilities, breaking down silos to encourage bridging. This one may seem pretty obvious as an anti-pattern, but many organizations that try to adopt DevOps try to do so without breaking down the barriers between the groups.

DevOps continuous delivery tutorials

Occasionally called “NoOps”, this is commonly seen in technology companies with a single, primary digital product, like Facebook or Netflix. This can even take the form of “you build it, you run it”, with the same individuals developing and operating applications. Before hiring a DevOps engineer, assess your business requirements and prepare a hiring strategy.

devops department structure

At the same time, POs keep the interaction channel with users open to obtain a better idea of client needs and fine-tune the solution in the making. By the book, the DevOps structure presupposes such DevOps team roles. As such, each team works independently and does not belong to any other team.

Jira Software

There are a lot of different ways to position DevOps within the organization, and what works in one environment doesn’t always fit the needs or culture of another. This is not to say that every employee in your organization needs to know the ins and outs of DevOps and software requirements. Nonetheless, it is worth building strategic connections between the core DevOps team and colleagues in nontechnical roles. 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.

devops department structure

Underperforming teams happen when you don’t build in the need for people to work together to unlock their unique talents. They have to work on sharing their knowledge and their lessons learned. And they have to strto makeking themselves obsolete; eventually all teams should be embracing DevOps and their team is no longer needed. In the 1980’s, Jack Welsh, at the time the CEO of General Electric, introduced the idea of the “boundaryless organization” in a process that became known as GE Work-out.

Cloud/Server/Network Architectures Development

Secondly, the leadership should recognize skilled individuals and train them to become leaders with personal support, coaching, etc. 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. In Atlassian’s 2020 DevOps Trends survey, 99 percent of respondents said that DevOps had a positive impact on their organization. The benefits of DevOps include faster and easier releases, team efficiency, increased security, higher quality products, and consequently happier teams and customers. This team structure assumes a tight integration between the Dev and Ops teams.

Measure all DevOps initiatives on organizational outcomes rather than local measures. However, the risk with 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. This is just one extra silo, and has all the same drawbacks with the addition of alienating other teams to the idea of DevOps. As DevOps is started up as a pilot program, a DevOps team forms to learn the new tools and technologies and then begin implementation.

DevOps Roles: Release Manager

Just as important is for operations teams to understand the desire of development teams to reduce deployment time and time to market. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an innovative concept of managing infrastructure operations using code. Unlike traditional environments wherein manual configuration files and scripts are used to manage configuration, IaC performs operations using code in an automated environment. It treats infrastructure as code applying version control systems, monitoring tools, virtualization tests to automate and govern the operations as you do with code releases. The code describes, manages, and converges the desired state of a machine or the infrastructure. While you avoid documentation, seamless collaboration becomes a reality.