10 Best Practices for a DevOps Team Structure

What exactly do you plan to achieve by implementing your CI/CD pipeline? This is an important question to ask, and an honest answer will give you and your team members a common goal and a clear roadmap to achieve the goal. Your goal might be to release software into production faster, increased automation testing, or more secure software.

Interaction models can help you understand the nature of dependencies between teams. This approach is popular with “cloud-ready” companies who often have established IT operations teams to deal with the complex maintenance of their software products. This doesn’t mean that some engineers can’t focus on a specific role – such as CICD, IaaS or automation – but those who are responsible for development tasks are commonly in direct contact with operations and release managers. This may include building and testing release packages, coordinating with different teams to ensure releases are ready to go live, and deploying releases to production environments. A Build engineer is responsible for implementing and maintaining the tools and processes used to build, deploy, and monitor software applications.

A cloud-first strategy has its fair share of advantages and disadvantages. Without proper planning, an organization could end up feeling trapped in its relationship with a cloud provider. While coreless banking is still a novel concept, it shows strong potential to liberate banks from the rigid software systems that… In order to bridge the Dev-DBA chasm, some organisations have experimented with something like Type 9, where a database capability from the DBA team is complimented with a database capability from the Dev team. This seems to help to translate between the Dev-centric view of databases and the DBA-centric view of databases .

From this third step, businesses will start to implement DevOps practices. These DevOps practices will comprise consistent integration and delivery, automated testing, and consistent deployment. It is vital that you first align your business goals with your DevOps team. Simply, it means that your company’s mission and vision must be in alignment with the objectives of the DevOps team. When we prioritize the Dev part of the DevOps, it is obvious that software developers and Quality Assurance engineers are at the very core of the DevOps team structure.

DevOps/SRE Team

For a business, measuring the job satisfaction level in systems is hard. And there is nothing worse for the final result and working process than unproductive and inconsistent employees. However, with a high-performing DevOps approach, it is easier to improve worker experience at a big or small organization.

By keeping honest feedback flowing between all teams teams can respond more quickly to any changes in the market. Feedback exists at many levels – from management sharing strategic plans, to technical teams monitoring the health of an application before and after a deployment. Post-release crashes are often the result of testing gaps, as continuous testing does not happen within each phase of the software building process. Besides, test engineer teams might not be able to simulate the bugs in the testing environment. As a result, companies have to condone the uneven and unpredictable pace of software building.

The Experience Assurance Expert (XA)

This will consequently give them a sense of purpose in their everyday work. The first thing to do when setting up a DevOps team structure is to create an effective DevOps team that comprises former or new experts with vast skillset that cuts across numerous disciplines. It is imperative to assemble your DevOps team and ensure that they have the best resources of the organization. The delivery stream of yesterday was a segmented process, often separating key teams and concepts into silos where people focused on their individual tasks. Coders coded, testers tested, and security experts secured the app and environments. But new and evolving DevOps process have begun to merge these silos into one team where members collaborate from concept through delivery.

As classic distinctions between the development team and operations team continue to dissolve in environments that call for continuous delivery, it will take cultural change, team-building, and the right tools to adapt. Remember that no matter how sophisticated your environment, processes, and tools are, it’s the people behind them that shape change into effective, forward-looking and successful DevOps culture and best practices. The responsibility of a DevOps architect is to analyse existing software development processes and create an optimized DevOps CI/CD pipeline to rapidly build and deliver software. The architect analyses existing processes and implement best practices to streamline and automate processes using the right tools and technologies. In addition, he monitors and manages technical operations, collaborates with dev and ops, and offers support when required. DevOps teams comprise professionals from development, quality, security, and the operations segment.

DevOps team roles

A C4E enables organizations to transform their IT teams into strategic business partners, as opposed to traditional technology functions. A C4E is a cross functional team that operates across central IT, Line of Business IT, and digital innovation teams. These teams work together to ensure that the assets the team creates are consumable, consumed broadly, and fully leveraged across the organization. A C4E supplements DevOps and agile efforts due to the collaborative team structure that it builds and the self-reliant and productive environment that it creates. To recover from this modus operandi, these two functional teams merged into one single product team.

Teams can build the DevOps toolchain they want, thanks to integrations with leading vendors and marketplace apps. Because we believe teams should work the way they want, rather than the way vendors want. The team will shift testing and QA further left into the development cycle, allowing the team to continuously test, without restricting speed. A dedicated team if you’re planning on moving a legacy application to the cloud. But rather than calling this team a DevOps team, you might try labeling it an automation team.

Expand & Learn

Then your solution is to spin out a new product and service, and to build another DevOps team which takes it over. Here you shouldn’t conceive product and service concepts only as entities served and provided to external clients who pay for them. But also you can freely build internal products, services or so called “micro-service APIs” and their respective DevOps teams for your internal clients. For instance if your billing system becomes too big for a team up to 10 people, then you should spin out another DevOps team which takes over database access API.

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. The team works optimally as one unit and does not split into separate teams to address work concerns. The team is autonomous within set boundaries and is aligned to other teams through a clear vision and goal definition therefore is interdependent on others. While there are multiple ways to do DevOps, there are also plenty of ways to not do it. Teams and DevOps leaders should be wary of anti-patterns, which are marked by silos, lack of communication, and a misprioritization of tools over communication.

• A cross-functional approach works best in medium and large companies and you’ll need enough staff to fill the requirements of each function.
• Your goal might be to release software into production faster, increased automation testing, or more secure software.
• This team structure assumes that development and operations sit together and operate on a singular team – acting as a united front with shared goals.
• Instead, the developer has to make sure that he or she writes a unit test that exercises each line of code written.
• Dummies helps everyone be more knowledgeable and confident in applying what they know.
• In fact, done correctly, DevOps will anyway enable you to save costs while you and your team quickly and continuously deliver.

We recommend that these teams work in the same office, but remote companies should open shared channels and encourage regular meetings. To develop a holistic user experience, we recommend building DevOps teams that are formed around multiple functions of your product and its lifecycle. Collaborating with development teams to design and implement new features.

They want to improve their practices and reduce costs, yet they fail to see IT as a core driver of the business. Because industry successes with DevOps are now evident, they want to «do DevOps» as well. Unfortunately, instead of reflecting on the gaps in the current structure and relationships, they take the elusive path of hiring «DevOps engineers» for their Ops team. Without a DevOps approach, there are often problems between releasing new features and stability. In a DevOps environment, on the contrary, the entire team is responsible for delivering both new features and stability. Thanks to the surefire mix of a shared codebase, CI, test-based methods, and automated tools, it is easier to find defects earlier in the process.

New products from Point A

This rapid development helps companies respond to market changes faster and innovate faster than competitors. Nearly half of all organizations who have adopted DevOps believe that it reduces their time to market, according to research by Atlassian. Experience with cloud-based testing and test automation in cloud environments such as AWS or Azure. 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.

Alert escalation and incident management tools play a handy role in helping members receive timely alerts and keep themselves updated with what’s happening across the infrastructure. While a regular software developer writes the code to build a product, the DevOps software developer/tester is involved across the product lifecycle. Responsibilities of DevOps developers include tasks such as updating the code, adding new features, and resolving bugs while ensuring that the application meets business objectives. In addition, the developer runs unit tests, pushes the code to production, and monitors its performance.

Leadership in a DevOps Team

In this team structure, the organization hires a DevOps consultant or team for a limited time. Their task is to assist the development and operations teams in their transition towards one of the above team structures. DevOps is generally seen as a combination of development and operations where both teams work cohesively and collaborate with each other.

How good can external experts judge and validate the security and quality of your software applications without being involved at any software engineering stage of your products and services? This is why high performer DevOps teams rely on external subject matter experts only to get consultancy, but they still fully own all non-functional requirements at every stage of their software engineering lifecycle. A DevOps engineer is responsible for designing the right infrastructure devops team structure required for teams to continuously build and deliver products. The engineer identifies project requirements and KPIs and customizes the tool stack. In addition, the engineer is involved in team composition, project activities, defining and setting the processes for CI/CD pipelines and external interfaces. 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 responsibilities.

Ensure application performance monitoring

Some team members can be stronger at writing code while others may be more skilled at operating and managing infrastructure. However, in large companies, every aspect of DevOps – ranging from CI/CD, to IaaS, to automation – may be a role. This can include a release manager who coordinates and manages applications from development through production, to automation architects who maintain and automate a team’s CI/CD pipeline. DevOps is a tech philosophy and culture that aims to improve collaboration between the software development and IT operations teams. Before DevOps, development and operations often worked in very siloed environments. Developers would traditionally write their code, pass it over to operations, then move onto their next task.