Hi all, recently i read Puppet State of Devops 2021 report link. Beside gaining a lot of insight from the report, i am also fascinated by a very interesting chart about aggregate team composition for low vs medium vs high performing organization from one of the slide.
Beside telling the usual story about high DevOps evolution characteristic like high performing team invest a lot in automating infrastructure / internal platform or low performing team has significant silo between developer & operation team, i also notice something different.
High performing team has less team composition which emphasis is on architecture or best practice, and has higher team composition which focus on providing reusable assets (tools, library). Below is subset of related statistic.
| Teams | Low | Medium | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| A team that creates reusable assets (e.g., libraries, tools, or services) for other teams to assemble into solutions | 3% | 6% | 10% |
| A team that defines the standards, processes, practices, frameworks or architectures that other teams must follow | 16% | 10% | 7% |
| A team whose primary mission is to help define and encourage the adoption of good practices by other teams | 7% | 9% | 4% |
If understood naively, these statistics would imply that high performing organization doesn't invest much in architecture or best practice, and invest more in tooling/library, hence the click-bait title of this post. It would mean that high performing organization doesn't invest much on DevOps Center of Excellence.
Of course, this naive conclusion is wrong when we look at example of high DevOps evolution company, like Google or Netflix, as frequently they have exemplar best practice (like code stylesheet, or coding practice) and deals with really complicated architecture, like highly available, fault tolerant, zero trust security.
Then maybe, just thinking out loud, there is other reason that this statistic happen. maybe it's:
- High DevOps organization thought that centralized best practice / architecture is slow or ineffective, and prefer shared / decentralized approach to it like frequent pair programming
- Hiring & Screening of Engineers, FANG companies is notorious for their screening of engineers to have high standard on best practice / architecture
But these reasons is just hypothesis from me, i want to understand what's the actual difference or reason of this discrepancy, could anyone with relevant experience (i.e has work experience in high devops evolution team before) share their thought / experience on this issue?
Top comments (1)
I think that you are missing the impact of the "cross-functional" team in the "higher level" organizations. This implies that as organizations evolve, they create teams with a mix of skills (presumably including architecture and governance) as opposed to specialized siloed teams with minimal interaction. This seems to coincide with my experience. The best teams I've worked on have teammates with a good deal of cross-training and general technical skills in addition to their specialty.