What are the characteristics of a DevOps team?

Putting Ops in a Dev team or vice versa it is not sufficient for practicing DevOps. There is more to it. So what does a DevOps team typically do?

1. Measure

A DevOps team measures itself, it's product and the business value it generates. The team measures itself via feedback and reviewing of goals. The product is measured via tests through automated pipelines and value is measured via stakeholders and performance indicators in the application it builds.

2. Performance

A DevOps team strives for performance and improvement at all time. By regular inspection a DevOps team looks for performance improvements in the way of working, in the application and in its organisation.

3. Risk and refactoring

A DevOps team will do risk analysis, refactoring and supports secure coding and operation. The team is on top of its game when it comes to security and uses tools to measure the static code and does penetration testing on the running application. It refactors code, rewriting code blocks for better performance, improving code quality and readability. 

4. Automation

A DevOps team will strive for full automation of changes from testing, building, deploying to maintaining. Full automation is achieved by coding a pipeline, using gates to test for quality and automate deployment. They get rid of all manual actions in the process. They try to achieve a self healing system when production falters.

5. Transparency

A DevOps team is always transparent and open in what work and when they perform it. Visual management is available for all who want to see it, that is the team, but also stakeholders and leaders. Opening up the ability for them to help and improve.

6. Vision

A DevOps team has a vision and strategy for each product they support. That vision is derived from the company vision. Strategic goals are the lighthouse on the horizon for the teams, so they can create focus on what needs to be done. Vision created by leaders must be simple and clear for everybody to understand.

7. Mixed roles

Members of DevOps teams work together mixed in multiple roles. Not everybody needs to be able to do everything, but the team should have the capabilities to do everything. No outside support should be needed. With pairing knowledge is shared so there is no local hero or one weak spot.

8. Dependencies

A DevOps team keeps track of all life cycles, versions, licenses and dependencies it uses. By actively managing dependencies a lot of misery is avoided. Understanding versioning and deprecation is mandatory for good life cycle management on dependencies, but also for the application that is built.

9. Autonomy

A DevOps teams strives for full autonomy and loose coupling in the organisation, processes and technology. Hard coupling makes a team dependent on other parts of the organisation or on a certain technology. By trying to interface with dependent things, dependencies are loosened, which makes the team and application more flexible.

10. Responsibility

A DevOps team is solely responsible and in full control for the product they work on. This must be supported by leaders. Leaders are stakeholders and impediment removers, they support the team in improving performance, they should not interfere with the work that needs to be done. If they need to interfere it is via the vision, mission and strategic goals they develop for the team.

Disclaimer: A team practicing DevOps does what's on this list, but a team that does what is on this list is not per se practicing DevOps.