Death to the DevOps team - Agile Cambridge 2014

Death to the DevOps Team! - how to avoid another silo

Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting Ltd.

An increasing number of organisations - including many that follow Agile practices - have begun to adopt DevOps as a set of guidelines to help improve the speed and quality of software delivery. However, many of these organisations have created a new 'DevOps team' in order to tackle unfamiliar challenges such as infrastructure automation and automated deployments.

Although a dedicated team for infrastructure-as-code can be a useful intermediate step towards greater Dev and Ops collaboration, a long-running 'DevOps team' risks becoming another silo, separating Dev and Ops on a potentially permanent basis.

I will share my experiences of working with a variety of large organisations in different sectors (travel, gaming, leisure, finance, technology, and Government), helping them to adopt a DevOps approach whilst avoiding another team silo.

We will see examples of activities, approaches, and ideas that have helped organisations to avoid a DevOps team silo, including:

- DevOps Topologies: "Venn diagrams for great benefit DevOps strategy"
- techniques for choosing tools (without fixating on features)
- new flow exercises based on the Ball Point game
- recruitment brainstorming
- Empathy Snap, a new retrospective exercise well suited to DevOps

This session will provide 'food for thought' when adopting and evolving DevOps within your own organisation.

Transcript