How to build a DevOps culture in distributed teams? With the greatest of difficulty

DevOps Summit 2016 panel agrees: building a DevOps culture across distributed, diverse teams is hard, but doable

Implementing a DevOps culture across geographically distributed and diverse teams is challenging, according to the expert panel at Computing's recent DevOps Summit 2016.

"It's hard. Everything is harder if you're in a distributed team, particularly when you're going to go through this big mindset change; a big change in behaviour," said Steve McDonald, head of software development at retailer Tesco.

It can be challenging enough to persuade teams that are located in one place to change the way they have worked for years, but they will at least absorb many elements of a new development and operations culture from their work environment. That is much less likely when an organisation has offices all over the world.

"You're going to learn a load of new things and use a load of new tools. If you're all in the same place, you'll get some of that just by osmosis and behaviours will rub off on people," said McDonald.

The key, he continued, is to engage people in "the conversation" and continue having those conversations to embed the change. New communications tools can help with this. "You've got to learn about how to have those conversations. You can't not have them. We've seen a large number of tools growing up around this and it's one area I think tools really help.

"You've got things that allow you to do screen sharing, to do pairing, to have conversations in chat rooms. And taking advantage of those and building them into the teams' day-to-day life is important.

"When you are in multiple locations, the temptation is always to segment people. You'll have your office guys in location one, your devs in a second location and someone else in location three. Inevitably, that leads to these artificial walls going up between those teams and you never really get to the collaboration culture that you're looking for when you're adopting DevOps," said McDonald.

Christy Ross, head of application services at the Financial Times, admits that making globally distributed teams truly joined up so that they genuinely "follow the sun" can be hard enough at the best of times. But implementing and instilling DevOps across countries and continents takes this challenge to a new level.

"We work with a software company in Romania, which is working pretty well from a DevOps perspective. They are a pure development piece. They work well with our onshore teams involved in agile, so they feel a part of the whole process," said Ross.

"We also have a permanent office in Manila in the Philippines, where we have about 40 IT staff, split between developers and operations. That is primarily there to follow the sun approach for support, but it is proving more difficult. This is because, certainly on the operations side, you don't have the same flexibility of 'dropping' those individuals into programmes of work in order to get a view of what's going on [because] they're more of a traditional support function."

At LV=, meanwhile, automation and delivery lead Andy Hawkins does not manage such a distributed IT team, but has done in previous roles. "The biggest challenge of the lot is keeping that shared mindset and culture. Once you get that thought and mentality going and you understand that you're sharing the same product and the same end, the feature teams can come together," said Hawkins.

He found that by starting with the tools - contrary to best-practice advice - certain DevOps practices simply percolated from the ground up. However, he added, senior management buy-in and authority for the shift is a necessity.

"We started with the tools and a bit of a biological, groundswell piece. Tool adoption has gone fantastically. Our CIO provided the money for those tools, but... layers of senior management have to be brought in to enable the behavioural/cultural change to happen," he said.

"Skills adoption can occur, tools can arise and methodologies can change. But the people who have facilitated this change have to buy in at all levels."

Miss Computing's DevOps Summit 2016? Sign-up now to Computing's Cloud & Infrastructure Summit 2016 NOW