Effective DevOps

Chapter 10. Affinity: Misconceptions and Troubleshooting

The misconceptions and issues that come up around affinity are often similar to those around individual collaboration and communication, but at a higher or more organizational level.

Affinity Misconceptions

People often have differing ideas about the responsibilities and contributions of various teams within an organization, as well as how much affinity and sharing makes sense in a devops environment.

Ops Engineers Aren’t as Valuable to the Organization as Developers Are

While it doesn’t always refer specifically to operations and development teams, the idea that some teams are inherently more valuable to the company than others is a common one that can be very hard to shake. Part of this stems from tangible versus intangible work. Development work on products that ends up in front of customers is much more tangible to someone who doesn’t necessarily understand the details of a team’s day-to-day work, as are the mockups that a design team can put together and show. For work that tends to be visible only when it is missing or done poorly (think of a site outage or a rude customer support agent), this is especially true—negative events stick out in our minds much more clearly than positive ones.

The power of organizational affinity and relationships between teams is that teams can support and help each other, rather than getting in each other’s way. An operations or internal tools team can stand in the way of developers ...