This document provides tips for helping developers and system administrators improve communication and collaboration. It recommends bringing the teams together both physically and through knowledge sharing. Celebrating successes and sharing systems and data can help break down silos. Regular communication through meetings and open discussions can also help build understanding and trust between the roles. The overall goal is establishing common values and a shared purpose to help the teams work together effectively.

1. DevOps Counselling
Or: How to help your developers and sysadmins
learn to love each other (again)
TOM SULSTON
http://thoughtworks.com
@tomsulston

2. Counselling?

3. Most problems
are
non-technical

4. Values
Common purpose
Sharing
Helpfulness
Technical rigour
Rich communication

6. Top Ten Tips

7. Agile development
Good analysis & stories.
Iterative development + deployment
Continuous Integration then Continuous Delivery
Automated testing
Bigger fish to fry

8. Sit together
Communication as a factor of distance
Make time to talk
Have open channels
Talk to individuals

9. Knowledge-sharing
Don’t create knowledge silos
Build special interest groups
‘irrelevant’ learning
Exploit Conway’s Law

10. Don’t tear down the
silos (yet!)
Give individuals time to work in their area
Reduce silo’d work
Don’t have big central services teams

11. Management structure
Similar reporting for whole team
Small number of hops
Reduce hand-offs
Value-stream mapping

12. Incentives
Are your incentives helping or hurting?
Focus on delivery
Reward everyone fairly
Don’t get gamed

13. Celebrate good times!
Come on!
Include everyone
Be thoughtful
Celebrate failure

14. laughingsquid.com

15. Share access to systems
Everyone has RW to Puppet/Chef
Share the pain when breakages happen
Use tests rather than restricting access
Pair to overcome mistrust
You are not in the sudoers file.
This incident will be reported.

16. Information-sharing systems
Developers should see into production
SAs should see new features
Big visible displays
Go to each other’s meetings

17. Gather metrics
What happens at release time?
How can we measure the system?
Evidence-based decision making.
Share the data!

18. Change Agents
Go and make friends
Stir things up
Break existing organisational boundaries
Internal or external?

20. How about you?

21. TOM SULSTON
http://thoughtworks.com
@tomsulston