How To Structure Tech Teams As Mission Critical Business Units When Mobile Takes Off

Platform teams enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. While the stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing an application in production, the platform team provides internal services that the stream-aligned team can use. That said, every DevOps team, no matter which form it takes, should include engineers who are skilled in both software development and IT operations.

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. 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. Although developers have become more directly involved in software testing in recent years, quality assurance engineers still play a valuable DevOps role.

Structure repos and version control within a project

Instead, the goal should be to introduce a build cycle that you can easily improve and iterate upon as expectations and best practices continue to change, and as newcomers emerge and attempt to disrupt the space. It has become commonplace for mobile to serve as the primary interface between businesses and their customers (think Uber, Seamless, N26, Instacart, etc.). Do you need to set up multiple repos within a single project or have a repo set up per project?

Prepare a structured process management system with a streamlined interview process and onboard mechanisms, and execute it to hire the right people for the right jobs, at the right time. 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.

What is DevOps? The ultimate guide

Secondly, the team works at the application level moving applications to the cloud, beginning with the least complex apps and then scaling up as required. Thirdly, the cloud migration team works at the data level, securely migrating system data and application data to the cloud environment. With infrastructure as code increasingly gaining momentum, the thin line between development and operations is quickly waning off. The current DevOps team structure contains people who are skilled in coding and operations.

It’s a model adopted by every big company out there, that seeks to move fast and be agile, and focuses on security by following DevSecOps practices. DevOps teams have evolved over time and while I’m sure they will continue to do so in the coming years, I’m fairly certain we’ll see more developers leaning towards ops and vice versa. We’ll get to see more people that can wear multiple wigs in the team while the so-called, one-trick ponies will be slowly phased out.

As well, Ops will be responsible for generating and cultivating new solutions, aimed at reducing the development and deployment times and pass on that information to Devs. Linux admins can use Cockpit to view Linux logs, monitor server performance and manage users. From new Spring releases to active JUGs, the Java platform is … Latency and lag time plague web applications that run JavaScript in the browser. Azure management groups, subscriptions, resource groups and resources are not mutually exclusive. Success isn’t determined by whether you host workloads on premises or in the cloud, and it won’t necessarily matter which OSes you use.

By team function

Likewise, developers should be prepared to communicate with security engineers early and often to help design code that is secure from the start. IT engineers should work closely with the security team to ensure that their deployment and management processes follow best practices with regard to application and infrastructure security. 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. Infrastructure as Code 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.

• Each organization has different DevOps requirements and each organization has a different perspective towards DevOps.
• Sales and marketing teams, for example, should understand how DevOps’ benefits can reinforce sales and marketing goals.
• All of this requires the right team, tools and technologies to conduct constant troubleshooting and perfect new app versions prior to submitting to app stores.
• UX engineers can help the rest of the DevOps team maintain that focus.
• Adopting practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery is key in enabling DevOps within organizations.

Each business unit within your company gets its own organization in Azure DevOps, along with its own Azure AD tenant. You can set up projects within devops teams structure those individual organizations, as required, based on teams or ongoing work. TFVC is a centralized version control system that is also available.

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The leader should ideally be a role model, show integrity, create a trustworthy environment and inspire others to follow that path. The excellent work from the people at Team Topologies provides a starting point for how Atlassian views the different DevOps team approaches. Keep in mind, the team structures below take different forms depending on the size and maturity of a company. In reality, a combination of more than one structure, or one structure transforming into another, is often the best approach. Provide the infrastructure and automation tools that the business developers require for releasing and supporting the code themselves. Taking an example from Spotify, the business teams are called squads, who handle specific services (e.g., search, playlist, player etc.).

In addition, the developer runs unit tests, pushes the code to production, and monitors its performance. On-call Incident management is not very different in DevOps environments. The only change is that developers are also involved in this process.

By building an SRE team, then, businesses get something very similar to a stand-alone DevOps team that exists alongside development and IT operations. The main difference from an actual DevOps team is that SREs can bring a broader set of skills to the table; for instance, SREs tend to be more heavily involved in incident response than DevOps engineers. The main advantage of this model is that it eliminates the need to hire a totally separate DevOps team. Instead, engineers whose primary role is development or IT ops fill a DevOps role, too. This approach tends to work especially well for smaller organizations, which may lack the resources for a stand-alone DevOps team.

Step 4:  Measuring the Effectiveness of the DevOps Team Structure

The trick to avoiding this pitfall is to make sure that whomever you assign to your DevOps team-within-a-team gives equal priority to DevOps and the primary team’s focus. The second is that structuring your DevOps team in the wrong way can cause long-lasting problems. For example, a DevOps team that includes every engineer in your business may be so large that team members cannot communicate effectively, which undercuts the collaboration that is a key goal of DevOps. On the other hand, a DevOps team that is too small may leave your business overly dependent on a handful of key employees to handle DevOps work, creating issues when those employees leave or are temporarily unavailable. 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.

DevOps Team Structure: What Are the Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

The Security engineer must work with both internal and external teams to ensure apps/systems are securely integrated, configured, managed, and supported in production. In a traditional waterfall software development environment, different teams are assigned different tasks. Developers are focused on introducing features according to project requirements using existing software, while the operations teams are concerned about the stability of the infrastructure. As such, change is something that developers want, and operations worry about.

Step 3:  Adopting Suitable Tools for the DevOps Team Structure

There’s a wide selection of tools available and you need to do a lot of research beforehand. I discussed this in my other article about creating a healthy DevOps toolchain. The opposite of the embedded DevOps team model is building a stand-alone team of DevOps experts who do nothing but DevOps. This team operates independently from — but closely collaborates with — development and IT operations. To avoid risks like these, you’ll need to select the right DevOps team model for your organization. Here’s a look at the most common approaches to structuring DevOps teams, along with their pros and cons.

The Solution Architect figures out how the requirements will be designed in line with the organization’s environment and existing systems. The Team Lead provides oversight and guides the team based on the chosen approach (e.g. scrum, Kanban, lean etc.). 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. The team is focused on creating customer value according to the committed time, quality, and value. They are transparent on performance, progress, and impediments, with a constant and relentless push towards improvement through feedback.

In the test phase, the code is tested, and the Release phase delivers the application to the repository. In the deployment phase, the application is deployed to the required platforms. This team structure assumes that development and operations sit together and operate on a singular team – acting as a united front with shared goals. 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.

While Ian Buchanan has broad and deep experience with both Java and .NET, he is best known as a champion of lean and agile practices in large enterprises. Mature teams rely on trunk-based development and CI/CD practices to maintain their codebase. Capacity planning should include dedicated time to address tech debt.

Similarly, cloud architecture is about creating a cloud platform by integrating individual technologies. It is not just abstracting hardware capabilities but also involves other processes such as automation, orchestration, APIs, containerization, security, routing, UX design, etc. Public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud are a few examples of popular cloud architectures.