ChatOps

Chapter 4. Roles and Responsibilities of DevOps (or Ops) Engineers

Until recent years, the roles and responsibilities of IT teams were made very specific and clear. However, through Agile software development and DevOps, cross-functional teams are beginning to demonstrate the effectiveness of tearing down the traditional divisions of labor. By making collaboration a priority, team members are beginning to understand more than just their own unique roles within their teams and organizations. Empathy between teammates and even different teams begins to take hold, and a sense of ownership and accountability becomes central to all actions. That empathy then bleeds over into the designing of services (both software and infrastructure), and the end users’ needs are given the utmost consideration for all business decisions.

Build Empathy

Should your organization make the unfortunate decision that teams should remain isolated and task-specific, ChatOps still helps to create greater empathy within the teams.

The visibility of work as it takes place helps to create a shared context and understanding both within and across individual teams. It’s easier to accept that your own request cannot be completed immediately when you have visibility into the work of others.

Goal Alignment

In previous software development and IT efforts, goals often varied from one department to the next. Software developers were incentivized and rewarded for meeting metrics typically tied to quantity of code “shipped.” ...