New year, first new post. This is a reflection I’ve been mumbling over for the past few months.
I am building up a session about DevOps during the COVID-19 pandemic, and when researching things I quickly found a trend I frankly disagree with: apparently, DevOps on its own should warrant a boom for technology and quality within teams working within the technology industry.
Look around yourself:
Solving the DevOps Dilemma in the COVID Era
How DevOps Can Save Your Business from COVID-19
Why DevOps Is Important During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Work-from-home mandates may be DevOps’ shining moment
I can go on and on. DevOps as the silver bullet. Don’t get me wrong, it might be right for some. DevOps is the best way forward, but results coming out of a good adoption plan are not a direct consequence of doing DevOps. It’s not like you are suddenly going to turn things upside down and adding all the best practices, the automations and the tools you could think of overnight just because you are working from home.
Let’s bring it closer to home: teams are made of people, and we all work remotely now, from our homes. I lead a team on a daily basis, and I am lucky enough to have a dedicated room to work from with all the equipment necessary (even too much of it sometimes…). The struggle is real - no Teams, Slack, Webex can replace our human interactions. All the side-of-desk conversations are now gone, all the random conversations happening in shared spaces stopped, nobody bumps into each other anymore.
This has got a direct impact on the way people behave and the way they work in a DevOps environment.
There is an overhead (and in human terms, overhead means stress increase) in any activity that requires human interaction - be it open a chat on Teams, starting an impromtu meeting, anything now requires a conscious effort which is inhevitably higher than the in-person equivalent.
People are naturally blurring boundaries, which is unfortunate to say the least. People are learning new things all the time, and you can see the fight between sticking to the new versus old and trusted habits. It’s not easy, and our 24x7 hyperconnected world adds a new variable to it.
It is taxing, and you can see it day in day out. I take steps every day to make sure people are not just engaged on the technical side but also as part of the broader fabric of the team and the organisation. We are not just connected from our homes to work, we still need to remember the human side of things. Cultural differences, mistakes, communication misunderstandings will happen no matter what, and they will also be amplified by the partially disconnected nature of the shift towards remote work.
From a technical perspective you can see that people are more reactive, and it means that the overall quality can either increase or decrease.
It’s not a one-way system: people can actually suffer from being disconnected from being with one team in a room and actually decrease the quality of what they do. These people will lack the passive input of colleagues, the ideas brought out of a conversation with a colleague over a cup of coffee. Pull requests will take longer, you could see someone suddenly communicating less and be more isolated on a technical problem. Bugs might pile-up, or become more specific. Someone might just be dropping the ball from time to time. It’s not stuff you sort out by installing or deploying yet another tool, or by adding a stand-up meeting.
Like i said - teams are made of people, you will never get a constant output or a predictable reaction. Listen, adapt and try to steer accordingly.