Building a DevOps Culture

Chapter 5. 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. ...