Challenges to effective DevOps collaboration

Source:-sdtimes.com

Developer productivity is impacted by many factors, including an organization’s tools, practices, policies, and individual preferences. As you evaluate your current collaboration landscape, consider how the following may be holding your organization back from optimizing DevOps team efficiency.

Collaboration silos inhibit productivity
Teams tend to organically develop their own ways of working together using favorite communications tools and methods to power workflows and day-to-day teamwork. It gets complicated when a team needs to collaborate with others across the organization and externally. When everyone is using different tools, it creates communication silos that become hurdles to effective cross-team and cross-functional collaboration. The added friction makes it harder, and slower, for your organization to get things done.

Limited, frustrating legacy messaging tools
Many products on the market offer enterprise messaging capabilities. Legacy platforms, like Jabber, Lync, Yammer, or Microsoft Teams, are focused on communications and social networking, providing lightweight feature sets for enabling group chat, audio and video conferencing, or file sharing.

However, for development teams, simple chat is not enough. They need a modern solution that supports the complexity and dependencies of DevOps teamwork.

Teams need to communicate, but they also need to collaborate, with efficiency and speed, connecting to all of the disparate tools and systems that help them get the job done. While tools like MS Teams provide basic chat capabilities, a truly modern solution also provides features like robust search, granular user permissions, and text and code formatting. In addition, modern tools not only provide chat features, but also enable integrations and automated workflows connected to code repositories, CI/CD systems, and other mission-critical systems developers use every day.

Too many manual tasks and workflows 
Development teams depend on automation to help them deliver higher-quality software faster. For many workflows, such as CI/CD or incident response, messaging and automation go hand in hand—humans, bots, and systems need to exchange critical information to keep everything moving smoothly. Yet most messaging solutions do not integrate with DevOps tools and systems, such as Jenkins, GitLab or Jira. People are forced to manually log into numerous dashboards to accomplish simple or repetitive tasks, or rely on others to share information.

This context-switching not only slows an engineer’s pace, but it also breaks their focus and flow, making it more diff icult to focus on writing clean code or resolving high-priority bugs.

Lack of control over data security & compliance 
Data security is critical to any organization, and for those with strict compliance requirements, it is paramount. IT teams must maintain a strong security stance over all company systems and data processes, including messaging.

However, since technology evolves at an increasing pace, development teams also need the autonomy to work with the tools that best fit their needs. So organizations are faced with the challenge of providing developers with the freedom to use the best tool for a specific use case, while still maintaining control and ownership over data.

If developers aren’t given the tools they need, IT may face a proliferation of unauthorized use of tools that are outside of their control, leaving the company at risk of a data breach.