DevOps Team: Roles and Responsibilities Explained

devops team
May 13, 2020

The demand for DevOps has increased across the IT organizations due to the speed and business agility it offers throughout product development. This setup helps in speeding up and streamlining the interactions that take place between the operations and development teams.

We can say that DevOps is more about an approach that helps us to speed up the project development process through efficiency and the right choice of team. So without wasting any more time, let’s see what DevOps is all about.

devops team

What is DevOps?

DevOps can be defined as more of a process that brings together the software development team and the IT operations team. Under this term, we work towards bringing together these two different and independent entities so as to boost the software development process. DevOps is all about bringing together the processes, tools, and people who can speed up the software development processes, while shortening the time to market, make it less expensive and reduce the occurrence of errors.

devops team

Why DevOps is important?

DevOps can be essential for your business if you are focusing more on profitability, productivity, and better market share. Even though you cannot have monetary gains with DevOps, it can help you make them achievable. Again, if your competitors have implemented DevOps then you will end up far behind in the race.

DevOps culture helps the organization to move ahead with the single goal of achieving success together. Here everyone will be participating in the software development and will be responsible and accountable for its early release. There will be no communication barriers between the participants, thus making things better for everyone.

devops roles & responsibilities

The main roles and responsibilities within the DevOps team are as mentioned below:

1. The DevOps evangelist

A good number of IT companies have exploited the benefits of DevOps while there are others, who are in the process. It is not possible to experience the change on its own, rather you need to do the change and this is where a DevOps evangelist comes in.

The DevOps evangelist is responsible to promote the benefits of DevOps and for that he or she will have to first identify and quantify the business benefits which come through DevOps. The DevOps evangelist will be responsible to bring in the change and he or she is responsible for the people who part of the process. He or she will buy-in from the operational and development teams, the roles for the support DevOps delivery methods will be identified and ensure that IT professionals are skilled and trained enough to carry out those changes.

2. The release manager

The Release Manager is also known as the Product Stability Manager. His or her responsibility towards the project is that of a project manager. He or she is responsible for the coordination and management of the project right through the development phase to the production. In order to maintain continuous delivery, he or she will supervise the coordination and integration of development, project testing, and deployment.

Most of the project managers are not required to have technical knowledge regarding the project while on the other hand, Release Managers need to have the technical knowledge, and skills needed to maintain and run the delivery toolchain of the application. In the general scenario, the Release Manager is quite familiar with agile methodology and he is responsible for the general progress of the project. They keep on measuring the different metrics throughout the tasks and interpret it to offer visibility into the DevOps process.

3. The automation architect

The Automation Architect is known by other different names like Integration Specialist or Automation Engineer/Expert. The sole responsibility of this person is to find the right processes and tools which are needed to come up with an effective and efficient environment for DevOps that is automated.

The role of an Automated Expert is very crucial as DevOps mainly depends on automation. For continuous deployment, they design, analyze, and implement strategies. They do this while ensuring the production and pre-production systems have high availability. DevOps needs a reliable environment to work on and the Automated Expert ensures to provide it. With an increased level of automation throughout the project stages, it becomes possible to deliver high-quality code in a faster and easier manner through each sprint of development.

4. The software developer/tester

Based on the business requirements, the software developer starts to write code in order to develop the final product. The role of a software developer increases and goes beyond the scope within the DevOps team. Apart from just writing codes, the software developer also performs a set of other tasks like deployment, unit testing, and continuous monitoring. It is recommended that they should work towards automating as much as tasks possible in order to deliver efficiency and quality.

We have seen above that the software developer carries out some form of testing, still, it is recommended to have a dedicated QA team for your project. The bugs in your project get tested, verified, and documented by the QA Testers. You need to understand that the role of the QA Tester here is not just limited to testing the project; rather they ensure that the project works optimally. They do this by checking whether the project works as per the specifications documented and the features added in there work as expected.

5. The experience assurance professional

In order to successfully deliver the final product, the role of the Quality Assurance Professional is crucial in software development. With DevOps adoption within the organization, it becomes important to have a different kind of control which carries out user experience testing apart from just testing the functionality of the product. This is where you need an Experience Assurance professional.

The overall user experience of the project is the sole responsibility of the Experience Assurance Professional. Apart from ensuring that the final product has all the features developed and defined based on the specification, they also work towards ensuring that the product delivers proper user experience.

6. The security engineer

You need to have a security or compliance engineer on board to keep your organization safe. They do this by ensuring the developed product meets the set of regulations and standards. Such a step is crucial in building the trust of the users apart from keeping your organization away from lawsuits.

It is the role of the security engineer to ensure that the product under development is safe from any kind of attack. They work continuously with the developers to come up with a product that is safe from any kind of technical attacks and at the same time, they try to safeguard the users from social attacks.

7. The utility technology player

In the general case, developers only focused on the development and so had no role in post-production systems. Things were not much different for the other players who were involved in software development. This means that they tried to stick to the single task that was assigned to the role and once it is done, the product was passed on to the next level.

Things are much different in the case of DevOps and it needs something more than having the traditional IT team for development, operations, admins, etc. who did their work and passed on the project to the next person or team. In the case of DevOps, you need to have utility team members who can take part in the different areas of the project development process with ease. They can easily take up the role in database management to resource management, development to security to support. It is important that you choose the DevOps team with varied skillset who can easily fit into different roles like system admins who can start working on the code or the developers who can start coding itself.

Final thoughts

Here we have made an attempt to explain the different roles and responsibilities of a defined DevOps team. However, it has to be noted that there are no hard and fast rules to follow the same for your DevOps team. Based on the organization’s needs and demands, the structure of the DevOps team may vary too. When it comes to building the ideal DevOps team, you will have to go through some trial and error. You should always keep an eye for the people who have the fire to learn new things and the capability to evolve themselves so as to fit into a new role easily within the development team.

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