Webinar – DevOps: Successful Communication Patterns for Effective Responsibilities

We were pleased to host a webinar on 14th October 2015 with Sabine Bernecker-Bendixen of Sof-IT and our own Matthew Skelton where we discussed some real-world successful communication patterns for DevOps.

Here is what was discussed:

Defining DevOps: usually, when talking about the DevOps, two sides are emphasized – tools and communication – but the determining factor of the success is behaviours and communications, with the tooling often being less important.
Debugging Communications: communications are often followed by misunderstandings and misunderstandings take a lot time to clear up and when we talk about DevOps – ship faster, build faster – there is no time left for clearing up all the misunderstandings. The best way is to reduce misunderstandings and avoid them – it would be much more useful: http://devops.com/2015/05/12/communication-blame-misunderstandings/
Prefer talking over writing – sometimes easier to talk directly instead of writing emails or messages.
Transparency is extremely important.
A ‘Facilitating’ DevOps team can open up channels of communication: http://www.infoq.com/articles/devops-team-topologies
Conway’s law affects our plans for communication: http://www.infoq.com/articles/devops-team-topologies and https://genehughson.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/carving-it-up-microservices-monoliths-conways-law/
Need to select the communication pattern suitable for the organisation
Developers often simply do not know how to deal with the operational side
Worst communication anti-pattern – “The other should know what I mean”