1 00:00:07,450 --> 00:00:11,610 After watching this video, you will be able to identify how organizational structure impacts 2 00:00:11,610 --> 00:00:14,519 DevOps, explain Conway’s Law, and 3 00:00:14,519 --> 00:00:17,910 describe the optimal organization for DevOps teams. 4 00:00:17,910 --> 00:00:24,250 Let’s take a look at how your organizational structure affects your ability to become DevOps. 5 00:00:24,250 --> 00:00:29,210 Part of becoming a DevOps organization is to first become Agile because Agile is a fundamental 6 00:00:29,210 --> 00:00:30,960 tenet of DevOps. 7 00:00:30,960 --> 00:00:35,290 You must ask yourself, “Is the culture of my organization truly embracing the Agile 8 00:00:35,290 --> 00:00:38,910 mindset?” It’s important to remember that Agile teams 9 00:00:38,910 --> 00:00:39,910 must be small. 10 00:00:39,910 --> 00:00:44,570 If you have large teams and you want to be successful at implementing DevOps, you need 11 00:00:44,570 --> 00:00:47,250 to make your teams small. 12 00:00:47,250 --> 00:00:49,720 Agile teams should be dedicated. 13 00:00:49,720 --> 00:00:53,690 You can’t have people committed to several projects and expect all of those projects 14 00:00:53,690 --> 00:00:58,670 to move at the same speed, or for your people to remain focused on any one project for too 15 00:00:58,670 --> 00:01:00,239 long. 16 00:01:00,239 --> 00:01:02,280 Agile teams should be cross-functional. 17 00:01:02,280 --> 00:01:06,290 What we call the “development team” includes all of the people responsible for developing 18 00:01:06,290 --> 00:01:07,290 the product. 19 00:01:07,290 --> 00:01:11,920 This means software engineers, test engineers, operations engineers, business analysts, whatever 20 00:01:11,920 --> 00:01:13,270 it takes. 21 00:01:13,270 --> 00:01:18,170 These people need to be on the same team and not working in silos getting each other’s 22 00:01:18,170 --> 00:01:20,979 attention through ticketing systems. 23 00:01:20,979 --> 00:01:23,009 These teams need to be self-organized. 24 00:01:23,009 --> 00:01:26,959 They commit to work one sprint at a time. 25 00:01:26,959 --> 00:01:32,539 Let’s look at why organization is important, starting with Conway’s Law. 26 00:01:32,539 --> 00:01:37,770 Back in 1968, Melvin Conway stated, “Any organization that designs a system (defined 27 00:01:37,770 --> 00:01:42,929 broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication 28 00:01:42,929 --> 00:01:43,929 structure.” 29 00:01:43,929 --> 00:01:48,090 For example, if you ask four teams to build a compiler, you will get a four-pass compiler. 30 00:01:48,090 --> 00:01:53,119 You should not be surprised you got a four-pass compiler; you asked four teams to build it. 31 00:01:53,119 --> 00:01:58,270 If you have a user interface team, an application team, and a database team, you get a 32 00:01:58,270 --> 00:02:00,520 three-tier architecture. 33 00:02:00,520 --> 00:02:05,109 You should not be surprised you got a three-tier architecture; you asked three teams to build 34 00:02:05,109 --> 00:02:06,130 it. 35 00:02:06,130 --> 00:02:08,960 This is Conway’s Law in action. 36 00:02:08,960 --> 00:02:14,900 If you want to change the way you build software and adopt a microservice application architecture, 37 00:02:14,900 --> 00:02:20,170 you need to reorganize your people around the architecture you expect them to build. 38 00:02:20,170 --> 00:02:26,349 In a traditional organization that is organized around technology, you might have a separate 39 00:02:26,349 --> 00:02:30,340 user interface team that performs all of the user interface work. 40 00:02:30,340 --> 00:02:34,980 Regardless of what feature you are building; you need to get the attention and time of 41 00:02:34,980 --> 00:02:39,719 someone on this team to add a user interface element for your feature. 42 00:02:39,719 --> 00:02:42,459 This is sometimes called the front-end team. 43 00:02:42,459 --> 00:02:46,579 Then you have the application team, or the back-end team, and they add the application 44 00:02:46,579 --> 00:02:47,579 logic. 45 00:02:47,579 --> 00:02:52,189 They don’t deal with the front end or things like database schemas because you have a 46 00:02:52,189 --> 00:02:55,790 database administrators’ team to manage all of that. 47 00:02:55,790 --> 00:03:01,430 No one touches the database unless they open a ticket to get a database administrator (DBA) 48 00:03:01,430 --> 00:03:03,819 to do the work. 49 00:03:03,819 --> 00:03:07,040 When you organize this way, you get a three-tier architecture. 50 00:03:07,040 --> 00:03:11,630 Like I said, you shouldn’t be surprised you have a three-tier architecture; you asked 51 00:03:11,630 --> 00:03:13,200 three teams to build it. 52 00:03:13,200 --> 00:03:18,060 Conway’s Law tells us that an organization will produce a design whose structure reflects 53 00:03:18,060 --> 00:03:20,410 the organization's communication structure. 54 00:03:20,410 --> 00:03:22,080 No surprises here. 55 00:03:22,080 --> 00:03:24,069 We got what we organized for. 56 00:03:24,069 --> 00:03:29,469 This is why paying particular attention to how you are organized is so important. 57 00:03:29,469 --> 00:03:34,430 It’s better to organize your teams around business domains. 58 00:03:34,430 --> 00:03:38,560 You may have an account team that manages login, registration, and user data. 59 00:03:38,560 --> 00:03:44,540 They have user interface skills, application skills, and database skills on a cross-functional 60 00:03:44,540 --> 00:03:45,620 team. 61 00:03:45,620 --> 00:03:47,370 Then there is the personalization team. 62 00:03:47,370 --> 00:03:51,269 They create personalization algorithms using artificial intelligence (AI). 63 00:03:51,269 --> 00:03:56,950 They control their own user interface, their application logic, and their own database. 64 00:03:56,950 --> 00:04:02,230 Finally, you might have a warehouse team that is building capabilities around shipping, 65 00:04:02,230 --> 00:04:04,599 receiving, and inventory. 66 00:04:04,599 --> 00:04:08,200 Those are the microservices that they manage from front to back. 67 00:04:08,200 --> 00:04:12,519 The warehouse team doesn’t need to coordinate with any other teams to develop their features. 68 00:04:12,519 --> 00:04:16,850 They don’t need to open tickets to get the attention of other teams to complete their 69 00:04:16,850 --> 00:04:17,850 features. 70 00:04:17,850 --> 00:04:23,300 They work as a small, dedicated, cross-functional, self-organizing team. 71 00:04:23,300 --> 00:04:28,020 If you don’t organize around business domains, you are not going to get the full benefit 72 00:04:28,020 --> 00:04:29,860 of DevOps. 73 00:04:29,860 --> 00:04:32,840 You want to align your teams with the business. 74 00:04:32,840 --> 00:04:36,770 Each team should have its own mission aligned with a business domain. 75 00:04:36,770 --> 00:04:41,440 Make sure that they have the autonomy they need so that it feels like a “mini start-up.” 76 00:04:41,440 --> 00:04:48,250 They need to be self-organized and cross-functional with 5-7 engineers, no more than 10. 77 00:04:48,250 --> 00:04:53,630 You then want to empower your teams by giving them end-to-end responsibility for what they 78 00:04:53,630 --> 00:04:54,670 produce. 79 00:04:54,670 --> 00:04:59,440 They commit, build, deploy, maintain, and operate their services. 80 00:04:59,440 --> 00:05:02,010 They control everything. 81 00:05:02,010 --> 00:05:06,360 And you want them to have a long-term mission usually around a single business domain. 82 00:05:06,360 --> 00:05:12,280 I can’t stress enough how important this is when creating high-performing teams. 83 00:05:12,280 --> 00:05:16,720 If you have people coming in and out of the team constantly, you will never get the benefits 84 00:05:16,720 --> 00:05:22,430 of having a dedicated team with a long-term mission that builds ownership and pride in 85 00:05:22,430 --> 00:05:24,480 their work. 86 00:05:24,480 --> 00:05:29,408 In this video, you learned that organizations must have small, dedicated, cross-functional, 87 00:05:29,408 --> 00:05:32,620 self-organizing teams to successfully implement DevOps. 88 00:05:33,372 --> 00:05:38,060 Conway’s Law implies that a company’s design results are a direct reflection of 89 00:05:38,060 --> 00:05:40,213 the company’s communication structures. 90 00:05:40,472 --> 00:05:45,100 Successful DevOps teams should be organized around business domains. 91 00:05:45,100 --> 00:05:48,636 Each team should have a mission that aligns with a business domain.