DevOps is a team sport, but getting people assembled to think and work as teams -- versus separate pools of specialists -- can be difficult. DevOps proponents not only need to be adept at the two core aspects of IT management -- development and operational issues -- but also be team-builders as well.
That's because DevOps "is not an organizational structure; rather, it defines a way to organize independent teams, a culture, a set of Lean principles, and a set of practices," according to a report entitled Full-Stack Teams, Not Engineers[1], released by IT Revolution. To succeed with DevOps, it's essential to have a "full-stack" or diverse team, rather than handing it to a single or small group of DevOps engineers, the report's team of authors, led by Jason Cox, director of platform and SRE at Disney, urge. The idea of having a full-stack engineer "is more myth than reality. Instead of hunting and waiting on the perfect full-stack engineer, a more sustainable paradigm would be for organizations to create full-stack teams. This balanced team is filled with people possessing a core set of skills plus different specialties."
The report is part of a series that came out of IT Revolution's fifth annual DevOps Enterprise Forum, held in in Portland, Oregon.
A full-stack team brings together a combination of skills from across the enterprise, Cox and his team explain. This enables the team to deliver the full-stack advantage of DevOps -- designing, building, deploying, and operating software throughout all development cycles of their deliverables -- "without the challenges of recruiting, developing, and sustaining full-stack developers or engineers." Such a full-stack team, for example, may be focused on delivering "an internal customer health dashboard that is used by all