DevOps Team Structures: Characterization and Implications

DevOps and Its Practices

Focus: Devops

THIRTY YEARS AGO, Jim Gray noted that “A way to improve availability is to install proven hardware and software, and then leave it alone.”1 For companies that provide services over the Internet, “leaving it alone” isn’t an option. Such service providers must continually make changes to increase the service’s value, such as adding features and improving performance. At Netflix, engineers push ne...

Understanding Team Innovation: The Role of Team Processes and Structures

The present study focused on innovation of teams, examining the contributions of team interaction processes (exchanging information, learning, motivating, and negotiating) and structures (functional heterogeneity and frequency of meetings) to innovation. Specifically, it was hypothesized that (a) team structures will be positively related to team innovation, (b) team heterogeneity will be posit...

Dimensions of DevOps

DevOps has been identified as an important aspect in the continuous deployment paradigm in practitioner communities and academic research circles. However, little has been presented to describe and formalize what it constitutes. The absence of such understanding means that the phenomenon will not be effectively communicated and its impact not understood in those two communities. This study inve...

Team Scaffolds: How Minimal Team Structures Enable Role-based Coordination

In this dissertation, I integrate research on role-based coordination with concepts adapted from the team effectiveness literature to theorize how minimal team structures support effective coordination when people do not work together regularly. I argue that role-based coordination among relative strangers can be interpersonally challenging and propose that team scaffolds (minimal team structur...