Defining each team member’s DevOps tasks and responsibilities can be difficult, but doing so is necessary to create a successful team. Our team wants to give some insightful information on this subject as a result, as we’ve been offering Dev Ops as a service after we successfully established it in the workspace ourselves.
Golpik, a business that develops software, implemented DevOps ten years ago. DevOps has since evolved into the foundation of every project we create for our clients. This article will outline the primary DevOps roles we utilized on productive projects and offer some helpful guidance on applying the strategy to your company.
Essential DevOps Team Roles
While a DevOps team may have DevOps engineers, this is not necessary. Small, cross-functional teams with all the skills necessary to create a successful product are now preferred by businesses. As a result, the following describes a typical DevOps team structure you’ll find in high-performing businesses:
1. DevOps Coach
First-line managers speak for the company. They serve their teams as coaches and mentors as well. Many of our managers previously served as tech leads, project managers, or offering managers before expanding their responsibilities to include resource management.
They take care of the following duties:
- Personnel concerns
- Money (procurement, reimbursement, etc.)
- The discipline of development (code review guidelines, test coverage, etc.)
- Discipline of release management (support plans, disaster recovery plans, etc.)
- Adherence (business conduct, auditability, security, etc.)
- Corporate efforts — Paperwork and red tape
- Eliminating obstacles (equipment needs, technology needs, unmet dependencies, etc.)
- Growth & career planning (areas for improvement, stretch assignments, reassignments)
- Coaching in Agile processes
2. DevOps Evangelist
For a DevOps transformation to be successful, leadership is essential. Your largest supporter of the DevOps methodology is a DevOps evangelist. Promoting its benefits within your firm is the main responsibility of this role. Evangelists are primarily in charge of establishing your DevOps team, getting buy-in from stakeholders by promoting DevOps services and removing organizational impediments.
A Google study found that psychological safety is the most important quality of effective teams. A DevOps evangelist’s mission is to foster an environment where mistakes can be made and lessons learned. Such a person inspires change throughout the entire organization by serving as a mentor and role model for their colleagues.
As a result, this position calls for technical proficiency, leadership abilities, and a thorough knowledge of your company’s business procedures.
3. Automation Architect
For DevOps, automation is essential. Depending on the scope of your project, this position may also go by the names Integration specialist, CloudOps architect, or DevOps engineer. Whatever the title, this position’s primary responsibility is identifying optimization opportunities to aid the rapid development cycle.
Their primary responsibilities include setting up Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, migrating to the cloud, presenting ideal automation techniques and tools, tracking all technical operations, and offering on-call IT support. They also deploy and maintain project infrastructure.
4. Software Tester
The main goal of DevOps is to eliminate gaps between teams. As a result, most of the DevOps team roles have extra duties. For instance, some of the tasks that QA engineers normally perform are taken on by our developers.
Developers generate new features while also testing, deploying, and monitoring them in production by using DevOps-proven techniques. Due to this, developers are involved throughout the entire product lifecycle instead of passing problems off to other teams.
5. QA Specialist
QA specialists now have more duties because developers are now actively testing software. Setting the project’s quality requirements and designing tests in accordance with those standards is their primary responsibility.
As development speed increases, it becomes more difficult for the QA team to test every new feature throughout a sprint. Without automated testing, it is frequently impossible to maintain excellent product quality at this point.
It is simple to become fixated on automation and other technical aspects when you deploy DevOps principles, forgetting that your primary goal is to please clients. Therefore, another important responsibility of a QA engineer on a DevOps team is to ensure an excellent user experience.
6. Product Owner (PO)
A manager who links the DevOps team and clients is known as a product owner. Depending on the project, a PO maybe someone familiar with your organization and its clients or a representative from an outsourced firm.
A PO’s primary duty is coordinating with stakeholders to establish a clear vision for the product. Based on this vision, they develop a high-level product roadmap, rank the team’s backlog of features, and assess their performance. With each new product release, they continue collaborating with customers to understand user demands better and provide more value.
Conclusion
Integrating DevOps culture into your workspace requires a change in the roles of leads and team members. Firms that provide DevOps service will primarily focus on aligning your team according to the DevOps requirements. Get in touch to learn more about how to adopt DevOps culture & the various technicalities that go into it.
