#207 – The DevOps Engineer

Some Developers are afraid that, once DevOps is implemented in their organization, gone are the haydays of doing what they love (i.e., developing). Therefore, they’re tremendously happy when they learn that someone from the former Operations or Product Support department actually will join their team. Oh, glory! 

What we need to remind these Developers of is that having functional silos in a Scrum Team (in a DevOps context) will impede their flow because of handovers; we don’t want to build a small wall within the team to throw work over.

Instead, as with any other speciality that a specific Developer in a Scrum Team has, we want to mitigate this potential bottleneck by teaching and motivating all Developers to embrace Ops activities. Developers who resist this must understand that the DevOps movement is a natural next step on an agile journey, and for a Scrum Team to own and support what they build, even after they’ve built it, is a natural progression in becoming a mature and high-performing team that develops software professionally—and embracing DevOps practices is is even a requirement in many organizations for delivering high-quality products.