In my earlier post, I introduced the basics of a DevOps team and what it stood for, and what its trying to achieve. In this one today, I will delve a tad deeper and introduce a possible structure of a DevOps team.
In my book, reinventing ITIL in the age of DevOps, I have discussed the nuances of a DevOps team and how it can be structured. There is no prescribed way to form a DevOps team. Do it the way you see it fit, as long as you meet your objectives and work towards increased collaboration.
Remember the Objective of a DevOps Team
Before I introduce the structure of a DevOps team, remember that this is a team that takes care of an application end to end – be it administration, issue resolution or development. This may or may not include the hardware part as well. It all depends on how the architects see it working.
The following section is an extract from my book on a structure of a DevOps team. Like I said earlier, it is a structure and not the structure of a DevOps team.
Extract from Reinventing ITIL in the Age of DevOps on a DevOps Team Structure
Application X is an internet banking program that caters to individuals and small business owners. It is currently in the development stages and let’s put down the roles that are required to support it. Today most projects work in an agile manner and the development of application X will be no different. It is based on Scrum practice and employs a single scrum team for its development. The DevOps team for application X possibly consists of the following roles:
Product Owner (PO) – The product owner is from the business organization and is the owner of the product backlog.
Scrum Master (SM) – The scrum master leads the development as a servant leader.
Developer (DEV) – The coding bit and unit testing are carried out by the developers.
Testers (TEST) – Testers are involved in developing test scripts and executing functional and non-functional tests.
Architect (ARC) – Architects design the software and are generally shared across multiple DevOps teams as they are not required to play a full-time role in a single DevOps team.
Database Administrator (DBA) – Database management.
Application Support (AS) – The support activities for the application.
System Administrator (SYS) – Configuring and managing tools.
Service Manager (SMG) – Managing services from the incident, problem, change and other service management areas.
IT Security (SEC) – Manage aspects of IT security.
