International DevOps Certification Academy™
What Are The Roles In Your DevOps Organization?
DevOps Generalist
The main role of a DevOps Generalist is to ensure smooth establishment, efficient and healthy progress and continuous improvement of DevOps Practices in a DevOps organization and in its DevOps teams. Therefore, competence and perspective of every single employee in a DevOps organization to be able to act with DevOps teams is a fundamental factor which determines the success level and lifetime of DevOps organizations.
Whether you are part of a DevOps organization or you just collaborate and work together with other DevOps teams, it is profoundly important for you to have a clear understanding about how and what makes DevOps methodology far more successful, efficient and delightful to work with than other software development and delivery methodologies. Therefore, regardless you’re an IT, software and technology practitioner, leader or manager or not, every professional at this current digitalization age (when software and everything around it are king) are highly recommended to be a DevOps Generalist.
DevOps Executive
DevOps Executives are responsible for successful utilization and application of DevOps knowhow within their organizations. They are key players for DevOps teams to enable cultural shift of doing and thinking in DevOps way. They have proven ability to constructively influence teams and management to get things done. DevOps Executives support the alignment of DevOps teams with business strategies, and they are responsible for identification, selection, scoping, prioritization and ultimately managing the penetration of DevOps into their organizations.
DevOps Executives select key members of their DevOps organizations, and they ensure all DevOps Professionals have been adequately trained, tasked and deployed to DevOps projects which best fit to their skill and experience levels. They work hard to coach and mentor DevOps teams, support resource planning, and they remove issues and obstacles to make the entire DevOps organization successful.
DevOps Executives report to executive management in terms of preset DevOps business mission objectives and identified business throughput metrics. They promote best practice solutions, achieved improvements, success stories and leverage them towards their entire DevOps organization. They work very closely with all DevOps teams, but with particular emphasis on DevOps Project Managers, DevOps Product Owners, DevOps Release Managers, DevOps Trainers and DevOps Coaches due to their particular organizational mission they strive to accomplish.
DevOps Project Manager
DevOps Project Manager is the person responsible for accomplishing the stated project objectives. Key DevOps Project Manager responsibilities include creating clear and attainable project objectives, building the project requirements, and managing the constraints of the project management triangle, which are cost, schedule, scope, and quality.
DevOps Project Manager is often a client representative and has to determine and implement the exact needs of the client, based on knowledge of the firm he is representing. DevOps Project Manager is the bridging gap between the development/delivery team and client. Therefore, DevOps Project Manager has a fair knowledge of the industry he is in, so that he is capable of understanding and discussing the problems with the delivery team and client. The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures of the contracting party, and to form close links with the nominated representatives, is essential in ensuring that the key issues related to cost, schedule, scope and quality can be efficiently resolved, and above all client satisfaction can be realized.
The term and title “DevOps Project Manager” describes the person who is given the responsibility to complete a project. DevOps Project Manager is the person with full responsibility and he has the required level of accountability and authority to deliver the desired project objectives within project budget, on time and with the highest possible quality.
DevOps Product Owner
DevOps Product Owner role is a very unique and broad role in DevOps which combines all of the challenging aspects of traditional Project Manager and Product Manager roles. Moreover, DevOps Product Owner represents the customer point of view in a DevOps team by ensuring that the right work is done at the right time. It needs to be tightly integrated with the overall DevOps Software Development and Delivery Teams and Processes to ensure maximum added value for each and every Product Release.
The DevOps Product Owners have a number of key responsibilities. Some of them are:
- Managing the DevOps Product Backlog.
- Support Creations of Product Release Roadmaps, and Release Plans.
- Identify Product Dependencies and appropriate Prioritization driven by Organizational Mission.
- Stakeholder Management and Communication.
Whether, you act as a DevOps Product Owner or not in your DevOps team, as long as you’re directly working with your customers it is fundamentally important for you to comprehend the role of DevOps Product Owner in order to be utmost helpful for your customers and to create the maximum added value for them.
DevOps Architect
A Devops Architect owns architecture, design and development of product deployment tools and processes. In this role, the DevOps Architect is expected to architect and develop innovative solutions to build and maintain product architecture, its related tools and processes for continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline.
DevOps architects are in charge of defining loosely coupled set of services whose consumers are minimally impacted by changes to these service or their environments. Some coupling is obviously inevitable since the consumer has to make use of the service but DevOps Architects minimize these dependencies by means of separation of interface and implementation, versioning policies, runtime contracts, platform independence and location transparency.
DevOps Architects become extremely critical for the success of DevOps organizations and teams. On the top of building an optimal loosely coupled architecture for products and services, DevOps organizations must possess an extremely reliable environment that is fully automated and free from obstacles. With waterfall, everybody had to have 4x4 cars to drive off-road on tough terrain. The DevOps Architect role is tasked with building the highway so the rest of us can use faster cars.
DevOps Developer
As a DevOps Developer, you transform the business goals of your customers into Software Solutions and Systems. The main difference between an ordinary developer and a DevOps Developer is that: As a DevOps Developer, during the full course of your work, you are conscious of the business goals and business demands of your customers. You are fully aware of why your employer has hired you and what your customers need and expect from you.
Moreover, as a DevOps Developer, you are the trusted technology partner of your customers. You give your employers and customers the full confidence and every reason to keep you on board. You are the one person who connects business goals and business requirements to software designs and lines of runnable software code. You are no longer a sole designer or programmer. You own the end-to-end engineering life-cycle of your entire Software from its requirements analysis, architectural vision and test automation until its user experience, extensions, operations, maintenance and end of life.
As a DevOps Developer, you are in charge of deploying running Software Solutions in small and frequent iterations. You excel and ensure the continuous delivery of your Designs and Software to your clients to create rapid and uninterrupted value for their and your businesses. You always remember that: Your mission is to have happy customers while building software that you and your customers love!
If you are a passionate Developer and a dedicated DevOps Software Engineering Practitioner to build efficient, world-class and high-quality systems, it is highly recommended to be a DevOps Developer.
DevOps Operations Engineer
DevOps Operations Engineers are responsible for monitoring, maintaining and deploying the state-of-the-art software and infrastructure behind the technology of their Products. They deploy and maintain Network Infrastructures and Servers at Data Centers. They also participate in DevOps Delivery and Deployment Teams on installations and develop product delivery and deployment contingency plans.
In this role, duties range from the physical deployment of data center-related technology to working closely with the various stakeholders, especially with DevOps Developers to ensure that availability, maintainability, monitorability and analytics are embedded into the cores of products.
Behind everything the clients of your organization see is the architecture built by DevOps Operations Engineers. And DevOps Operations Engineers are in charge of keeping these systems up and running. From developing and maintaining products and services to building the next generation of your platforms, DevOps Operations Engineers make product portfolio of their organization possible.
DevOps Operations Engineers are proud to be engineers' engineers and love voiding warranties by taking things apart so they can rebuild them. They're always prepared to be on call to keep their systems and networks up and running, ensuring their clients have the best and fastest experience possible.
DevOps Quality Assurance Engineer
DevOps Quality Assurance Engineers play proactive role for the processing of Unique Selling Points of their Product, Requirements, Use Cases, Software Architecture and various other software design material to find out desired test types to validate the quality of Product under Test. They work with DevOps Developers and DevOps Project Managers to determine Test Implementation Methodologies and Tools to run and operate the Testing Work.
DevOps Quality Assurance Engineers write Lists of creative Test Cases with strong “Break it” attitude. They also classify Priorities and Difficulty Levels of their Test Cases. They create and review detailed Documentation of Test Cases to make sure their Test Cases correctly perceived by the rest of their DevOps team.
DevOps Quality Assurance Engineers continuously follow up and review Test Execution Phases to ensure that implemented Test Cases realize their goals. They act as self-confident and dependable Subject Matter Experts to emphasize the objective and importance of their Test Cases. They raise and review defects, and they make sure that there is no compromise from planned Product Features.
Furthermore, DevOps Quality Assurance Engineers nurture the entire DevOps Team to review their Test Designs, and process their Feedbacks to add additional creative Test Cases and to reduce redundancies in their Test Designs. Last but not least, during a significant portion of their times, they automate, execute tests and they re-execute tests to validate bug fixes which are coming from Software Development Teams.
DevOps Information Security Engineer
In traditional configurations of IT organizations information security is largely an afterthought. It is yet another nonfunctional requirement that is often taken care when it is most difficult, expensive and hectic to identify and fix the problems.
DevOps Information Security Engineers design big picture security strategy of their organizations while laying out the details of an implementation plan. They understand the constant need to balance the benefits of incremental security measures with the potential burdens on the business. They proactively find and fix security problems in designs at early engineering stages of products, and in running software systems. They monitor networks, software telemetry and prioritize efforts based on risk.
DevOps organizations have DevOps Information Security Engineers working side by side with DevOps Developers and DevOps Operations Engineers. They embed their recommendations and subject matter expertises much earlier on into software development and delivery process. DevOps Information Security Engineers enable their organizations to build security into product during its entire end-to-end delivery life cycle.
DevOps Release Manager
DevOps Release managers work to address the management and coordination of the product from development through production. Typically they work on more of the technical details and hurdles in which a traditional project manager cannot be involved. DevOps Release managers oversee the coordination, integration, and flow of development, testing, and deployment to support continuous delivery. They're focused not just on creating, but also maintaining the end-to-end application delivery tool chain.
DevOps Release Managers closely work with DevOps Project Managers and DevOps Product Owners to create product release roadmaps, release plans, identify dependencies, make them visible, ensure prioritization of dependent tasks by DevOps teams, support management of DevOps Product Backlog, stakeholder management and communication.
DevOps Trainer
Like all other hyper growth trends in our IT industry, adoption of DevOps Methodology is also not immune to potential misunderstandings and misconceptions. Significant number of DevOps teams and companies make organizational, behavioural and operational mistakes which negatively impact the performance of the DevOps teams and their fit to the overall -and usually not yet really agile- organizations. Unfortunately these inconsistencies sometimes end up with the abolishment of DevOps practices from organizations which hurt our industry and the supporters of DevOps.
DevOps Trainers are talented DevOps supporters like you to ensure correct training and education of DevOps practices within organizations.
DevOps Trainers can be independent people from the DevOps teams in the organizations and they can be directly sponsored by the executives to enable top to bottom organisational training of DevOps. Alternatively, DevOps Trainers can be part of DevOps teams and work with executives to get the required support and to consistently train other parts of organizations to fit to the DevOps teams. If you would like to help your DevOps teams, business teams and executive sponsors to properly learn and implement DevOps practices, it is highly suggested for you to be a DevOps Trainer.
DevOps Trainers provide training services usually to their external clients to teach them DevOps in an educational environment setup. DevOps Coaches coach DevOps team members usually within their client organizations and make sure that they properly understand and operate with DevOps. They provide tips and tricks to teams as DevOps teams do their work in the real work environment.
DevOps Coach
Like all other hyper growth trends in our IT industry, adoption of DevOps Methodology is also not immune to potential misunderstandings and misconceptions. Significant number of DevOps teams and companies make organizational, behavioural and operational mistakes which negatively impact the performance of the DevOps teams and their fit to the overall -and usually not yet really agile- organizations. Unfortunately these inconsistencies sometimes end up with the abolishment of DevOps practices from organizations which hurt our industry and the supporters of DevOps.
Similar to DevOps Trainers, DevOps Coaches are also talented DevOps supporters like you to ensure correct understanding, penetration and adoption of DevOps practices within organizations.
DevOps Coaches can be independent people from the DevOps teams in the organizations and they can be directly sponsored by the executives to enable top to bottom organizational and cultural adoption of DevOps. Alternatively, DevOps Coaches can be part of DevOps teams and work with executives to get the required support and to consistently evolve other parts of organizations to fit to the DevOps teams. If you would like to help your DevOps teams, business teams and executive sponsors to properly understand, adopt and implement DevOps practices, it is highly suggested for you to be a DevOps Coach.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we covered the most frequently used roles in a DevOps organization. Let’s keep in mind that not every DevOps team in your organization must have someone with each of these roles. Less is more. Ensure your team focuses on significant few and eliminates trivial many to achieve IT and business performance your organization aims.
The best rule of thumb is your team should have roles and skills to enable best possible continuous flow of work. Flow is the subject we will start to cover from next chapter and onwards.
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