Why DevOps Is Essential For Remote Teams

The Coronavirus pandemic has had a profound effect on virtually all of our business lives — and that’s no different for DevOps specialists. The crisis has pushed companies to work remotely, and, in that context, some people feel like the continuity implied in DevOps is at risk. But that’s nonsense. With the right strategy, DevOps practices and strategies can actually benefit from the current situation.

I know so because at BairesDev, the offshore development company I work at, we’ve seen what happens when you use DevOps on distributed teams. The approach provided by our distributed teams allowed us to reimagine what these practices could be, which led us to further automation, delegation, and organization of our entire infrastructure. Naturally, this positively impacted our whole workflow, a process in which DevOps became essential.

That can happen for your company, too, especially in the current circumstances. Even though you might not feel it’s appropriate to make huge transformations during a pandemic, this deconstruction of DevOps can mean a lot to you now that you’re working with remote teams. Let me explain myself a little more before giving you some suggestions as to how you can reinvent your DevOps practices.

The Perfect Excuse

The COVID-19 pandemic is throwing so many challenges that you might think that DevOps isn’t really a priority right now. However, you can better answer those very same challenges with the right DevOps strategy in place. Through it, you can truly transform your business, increase your value creation capabilities, and better navigate the stormy weather this year has reserved for us all.

With the focus increasingly on accelerating the digital transformations of most companies, the pandemic is not just forcing you to work with distributed teams — it’s also pushing you to reimagine your workflow and face the inefficiencies you might have been omitting all this time. In turn, this serves as the perfect excuse to introduce as many changes as you need to ensure a smooth transition towards a more digitized environment, a moment when DevOps can truly shine.

The crisis might have broken up teams used to work in the same room, but that may be a blessing in disguise. That’s because it can provide opportunities to look at communication deficiencies, management issues, and more strategic factors that working on-site might be masking. What’s more — going through the crisis together, even when you work remotely with your team, will create a stronger bond while also cementing some of the best DevOps practices.

In other words, the pandemic can lead to the development and the operations teams to be on the same page simply because they’ll have to develop new ways of working in all senses: new communication channels, adoption of new tools and scripts, and overall sophistication of your organization when it comes to keeping in touch.

In short, DevOps can be of guidance during this difficult time by providing a strong framework for collaboration and flexibility among distributed teams to thrive. That’s the main reason why DevOps feels so essential right now — and why it’ll retain that nature for the foreseeable future.

How To Reimagine DevOps For Distributed Teams

There are plenty of ways to use DevOps to create a better way of working remotely with your team. Naturally, I encourage you to go ahead and try to adopt as many as possible, as you’ll see more substantial benefits if you do so. What’s more — it’d be better if you explore your possibilities.

With that being said, let’s explore some of the most important ones, practices that have served us as offshore software developers but that can work for many other companies as well.

• Migrate your on-premises environment to the cloud. For that, you can use virtual machine vendors or cloud providers like Amazon or Azure. The ideal would be to end up with a multi-cloud migration effort, but in the meantime, you can use this approach and bring your office environment to the home of your employees.
• Adopt automation for testing. You’ll need continuous testing to guarantee the continuous delivery that DevOps promises. Given the current situation, then, you definitely need to adopt automated tests. People doing manual testing on top of the crisis might bring you further errors. Besides, there’s plenty of automation tools you can use, so why add more workload to your DevOps cycle?
• Revise your identity management practices. DevOps is all about having a strict grip on who can access what, a need that’s highly increased when you work with distributed teams. However, don’t tighten up your access-related processes too much or you’ll end up creating obstacles for the daily work. A combination of analysis of your current practices and automation can take you a long way.
• Increase your communication frequency and incorporate new channels (if needed). Since you won’t have the possibility of arranging impromptu meetings, you’ll have to make it up by increasing their frequency. Even if you feel like you’re overcommunicating some things, it’s better to do so, as communication is critical for DevOps. Rely on as many tools as you need to do so, including project management platforms and Slack.
• Keep an eye out on knowledge silos. If you aren’t careful with how you assign tasks, you’ll end up having people that are the sole responsible for a specific job. That’s something that tends to happen with distributed teams, so you have to be vigilant because you don’t want your delivery cycle to get interrupted or blocked because the only person tackling a specific task is unavailable.
• Track and measure your progress. Create a roadmap for your projects, their phases, and even their tasks. In that way, you can adequately track the work and measure how much the team has accomplished. Doing so makes it easier for management to check on any process at any given time while also providing higher visibility to bottlenecks.
• Be open. This should be part of your company’s culture and something you apply in everything you do, but it’s worth remembering it. Listen to your team, explore new tools, and read the stories of other companies in your situation to see how collaboration can be further improved. You’ll be surprised as to how many opportunities you’ll find.

As you can see, these suggestions combine the technical and cultural aspects of working with distributed teams through a DevOps lens. You may notice that they aren’t precisely revolutionary principles (mainly because they are the main DevOps principles you already know). What’s changed is that they can be perfectly used in the context of distributed teams, so much so that these principles are essential for working remotely.

That’s why I think the pandemic is the best opportunity for you to finally embrace them in full and reinvent the DevOps processes you have today that may need to be up to the challenge of the current times.