DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry – including consultants, analysts, organizations, users and the leading vendors – for their opinions on the best way to foster collaboration between Dev and Ops. Part 4 covers more about combining Dev and Ops in teams.

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 1

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 2

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 3

EMBED IT OPS IN DEV TEAMS

Familiarity breeds respect. So, embedding the operations team with the software engineers not only allows for a better understanding of the day-to-day routines and broader challenges each group faces, it also creates a collegial culture.
Richard Morgan
VP of Engineering, Agiloft(link is external)

IT OPS AS DESIGN PARTNER

In a DevOps world, the Ops team needs to be a design partner with engineering. Similar to earlier integration between Engineering and QA that improves product quality via built in testability, this is needed for the operations team in a DevOps world.
Scott Davis
EVP of Engineering and CTO, Embotics(link is external)

OPSDEV

For a successful DevOps approach in practice, Development must position itself as a consumer of turnkey infrastructure environments. IT Operations then adopt an OpsDev approach, and provide infrastructure on demand for all steps of continuous integration – from compilation to qualification, through unit testing.
Yann Guernion
Product Marketing Director, Workload Automation, Automic Software(link is external)

Read Yann Guernion's blog: OpsDev: DevOps as a Bottom-Up Process

DEVELOPERS SPEND TIME WITH IT OPS

DevOps is about sharing responsibility of the complete delivery pipeline and working towards the common goal of delivering faster quality to market. To start, development teams must spend time with operations to understand what impact their code has once it reaches operations, and which processes and tools are used to keep the system running. This insight and collaboration breaks down walls and allows developers to produce quality products from the start by understanding what impact their actions may have.
Andreas Grabner
Technology Strategist, Dynatrace(link is external)

MAKE DEVELOPERS RESPONSIBLE FOR PRODUCTION MONITORING

Developers are responsible for production monitoring at the application level, which means that Dev & Ops have to work together on deployment technology and monitoring. When a developer has to troubleshoot in production, they make sure that the right kind of tooling is in place in the app. There's no throwing anything over the wall to Ops.
Andrea Adams
VP of Engineering, Spanning(link is external)

INVITE THE DBA INTO DEVOPS

One overlooked opportunity for improving Dev and Ops collaboration is inviting database administrators (DBAs) to the DevOps conversation. Numerous DBA pros operate with a foot firmly set in each realm, having learned both competencies to preserve production database sustainability; these are the next resources CIOs and DevOps leaders must integrate into DevOps teams. Organizations should begin seeing positive impacts within a few months, after allowing time for DBA recommendations to progress through the operational and product development pipelines. DBAs think capacity, performance, and recoverability at highly proficient levels and can incrementally blend database changes into the release pipeline. Having these new DevOps team members that speak the language of development and the language of operations allows for purer strategic communications and clearer product requirements understanding, resulting in better business product outcomes.
Master DevOps collaboration with DBA inclusion!!!
Mike Cuppett
Author of "DevOps, DBAs, and DbaaS"(link is external)

Read Mike Cuppett's blog: DBAs Hack the Collaboration Dysfunction Between Dev and Ops.

Read The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 5, covering communication.