"You do not have to be Albert Einstein to handle your IT assignments 'On Time' (i.e. To Schedule), 'At Cost' (i.e. To Budget) and 'To Specifications' (i.e. To Scope)"
Yaacov (Jack) Bar-Tor
Information Technology
YBT Services Pty Ltd
Mentoring the New Culture
As your pilot project progresses, you’ll be mentoring the product team in the values that foster a DevOps environment: communication, responsibility, respect, and trust.
Fostering open communication channels is the foundation of a successful DevOps culture. One of the most common complaints from many Operations teams is that they weren’t aware of an impending change, or weren’t told about a new product feature. When I have asked these folks if they attend the Development team’s standup meetings, the answer I typically hear is "No, we don’t go to their meetings, they never talk about anything that concerns Operations." Open communication leads to better collaboration throughout the entire team. Every team member should know that he or she can go to any other member of the team to ask a question, and expect to get an answer or some kind of help in finding one.
Your new DevOps-style standup meeting includes everyone. Your developers, your QA engineers, your system administrators, all of them get together to discuss what they’re working on. The benefit of this single change is immense, and even if you’re reading this article and thinking "This isn’t for me," bringing a full team together to intentionally talk about the product on a regular basis is going to help you build a better product.
Maybe your developers are working on how the product is going to use a new third-party API. They’re talking about credentials and authorization with that third party. QA will need to know how to write tests to flex the features; do they need fake accounts or dummy users? Your sysadmins will have questions about the SLA of the API, how failures will be monitored and rolled up for reporting. What if the API has an outage? The whole team has worked on the metrics and information necessary for the product manager to make an informed decision on disabling the feature. When everyone knows up front what new features are in the pipeline, it will be less likely for any of these topics to be missed. This makes your product more reliable and gives your customers a better experience.