Chapter 11. Make Work Visible

ChatOps helps to combine and facilitate key principles of not only DevOps, but Agile and Lean methodologies as well. By removing friction and waste in our processes as well as making the actions (automated or not) visible to more of the team from within group chat, a clearer picture begins to emerge. Teams have access to a record of not only how things get done, but the conversations that are related to those actions.

Many teams have realized that much of their daily repetitive work can be automated. Automation is one of the key principles of DevOps. By automating as much menial and repetitive work as possible, teams and organizations are able to free up more time to focus on new or harder tasks that cannot be automated just yet. Additionally, opportunities for exploration, experimentation, and innovation are made available when teams and their members aren’t spending unnecessary time duplicating efforts. By making that automation and the related conversations visible to more people, a number of benefits emerge.

Benefits of Making Work Visible

  • Create common frame of reference

  • Expose friction and bottlenecks in processes

  • See pain points together (i.e., create empathy)

  • Reduce work in progress

  • Swarm to problems together

  • Generate multiple perspectives

  • Document work in real time

  • Uncover areas of improvement

  • Create greater awareness for all

It’s likely that you or members of your team have already begun to automate much of your ...

Get ChatOps now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.