[exelius]

> DevOps is about dev and ops teams communicating and having empathy for the requirements of the other team.

DevOps is about not having separate dev and ops teams (or QA for that matter). It's about having one team that coordinates on implementing user stories and comes up with the right solutions. Some members of that team have certain skill sets - i.e. some are more ops focused and some are dev focused - but it's one team. It's about creating personal accountability; there's no more blindly assigning tickets to an offshore ops team and hoping it gets done right. If you're doing DevOps right, you developers and your operations people are on the same team, sit in the same area and attend the same scrums.

DevOps means that instead of saying "Ok, my work is done, but the deployment scripts need to be updated so I'll create a ticket with the ops team and they'll get it done next week", you can say "Ok, my work is done, but the deployment scripts need to be updated and I don't know how to do that, so I'll assign it to Mike." The feedback can go the other way too - if an implementation of a feature is too cumbersome to deploy, the ops guys are in the scrum with the dev guys and can work on a better design together, up front.

[chatmasta]

One good solution I've seen to this is a hybrid approach. QA was their own team, but sent a representative to each other team. That meant QA engineers had two scrums each morning -- one for the team they were assigned to, and one for QA as a whole. It worked very well. QA had their own processes that other teams didn't need to worry about, but QA also understood the needs of all other teams.