Tackle the DevOps headaches head-on - they're not as bad as you think

FT and Trainline tech leaders urge IT leaders to address issues like staff rota requirements from the off

Organisations embracing a DevOps culture should be honest about the problems it may cause and deal with them head-on, according to a panel of end-user experts.

Speaking at the Computing DevOps Summit in London on Tuesday, Sarah Wells, principal engineer at the Financial Times, said one issue the firm did not deal with straight away was about asking staff to work out of hours to deal with problems.

"We backed off dealing with the out of office issue when we should have just been agile about it and tried it and see how it worked and gone from there," she said.

Once they did address it, the issue was not as problematic as they feared.

"We put a rota in place and people were fine with it - it really was not as hard as we thought."

David Stanley, head of IS operations at the Trainline, said this was also an issue that they had "not thought about up front" and so had to address down the line, but that it would have been better to just tackle it from the off.

"If we could go back and do it again that would be something we would have looked at and asked how we needed to deal with it."

Paul Houghton, the technical delivery manager for NHS Choices, said that he wished the organisation had been more blunt about its adoption of DevOps.

"We're not in a position where we have a mature, agile development environment, but figuring out how to integrate operations into that is quite a struggle," he said.

"If we could start from scratch I would bang the two things together and just figure out how it works from there."

Cultural changes

During the discussion Wells from the FT also emphasised a point that was raised throughout the day regarding selling DevOps to those in the business who will be most affected.

"DevOps is all about culture change - and that is a challenge when you have lots of teams in specialised silos, with people very invested in their roles," she said.

"You've got to convince them it's not a risk to their job, even though it's a new and scary thing, but really a chance to become more integral to the future of the business."

However, the panellists poured scorn on the notion of adopting a "bi-modal" approach to IT, whereby the more traditional IT functions sit next to the DevOps teams, with Stanley from the Trainline calling it a "terrible idea".

"With DevOps there's lots of talk about getting good people in the door and creating the right culture to work in an agile way, to feel more empowered and so on and bi-modal IT just goes against all that," he said.

"You're going to have half the people getting glory, and half being ignored. With a two-tier system you're going to make people unhappy, and it just slows things down."