Red Hat announced jointly-engineered, integrated and supported images for Red Hat Enterprise Linux across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
This is part 2 of a 3 part series in which we explore keys to building high-performing DevOps teams. COVID-19 has shifted the way we work and has changed the dynamic of how we communicate with our teams as many learn to work remotely for the first time. Part 1 explores how to organize your teams around customer value. Now, let's discuss team alignment and collaboration.
Key 2: Team Alignment and Collaboration
Some research that I come back to frequently was done by Google as part of their Project Aristotle. They did multi-year research on 180 teams to answer the question "what factors are most conducive to high-performing teams?"
The 5 factors they isolated were somewhat surprising, and can be summarized as:
1. Psychological safety: members feel safe taking risks with each other.
2. Dependability: members reliably complete quality work on time.
3. Structure and clarity: members have clear goals and responsibilities.
4. Meaning: members have a sense of purpose in their work.
5. Impact: members feel that their work is actually having an impact.
The issue of psychological safety reminds me of the quote "Where there is fear you will get the wrong numbers" by W. Edwards Deming. Fear functions to inhibit open communication. In a knowledge-working organization that's lethal, as people won't share anything that smacks of bad news. But as the saying goes, "bad news ages badly."
Most of these topics are issues of culture and mission. Nevertheless, tools can help in some of these areas. For example they can help you:
■ Promote timely and transparent communication
■ Track and collaborate on plans and schedules
■ Track metrics and team goals
Very importantly, they can also connect your builders with their impact on end users. Continuous Delivery closes the gap between admins/developers and users, thus increasing motivation. Feedback from users closes the innovation loop. It's almost useless to build something and then have to wait 90 days to get feedback from end users. But if you can build something and start getting feedback within hours or days it's incredibly satisfying and opens the door to constant and incremental improvement.
Tools should ease and facilitate the collaboration process. Just as agile planning tools excel at enabling collaboration around work items, so version control excels at enabling collaboration around code. Ensure that any other tools used to manage testing, deployments, monitoring, etc. also allow for a single view of the work in progress that allows for input from all relevant members of the team.
Alex Sutherland from Liberty IT Solutions recently shared examples that illustrate these points based on his own experience of teams he'd been a part of.
"The lowest performing team I can recall being part of was an early SaaS startup. I had been invited to join the team as a QA analyst/ engineer. There were a number of challenges, but there were two main things lacking. One was a well-understood, user-centered design, and a clear, precise mission for how we were going to accomplish that. The second big gap was that we lacked any sort of application lifecycle management tooling to help us iterate quickly on the application. It resulted in kind of a classic failure in application development.
"The team were some really great people and talented engineers, and there were a lot of factors that could have contributed to success. But because we were hampered by a lack of the tooling that we really needed to be successful and a proper design approach, we struggled. Ultimately I left the team, and eventually the startup failed. It was really disappointing to see, since so much time and effort was wasted. Even at that time there were plenty of tools available that we could have utilized, but that hadn't been prioritized or invested in. As sad as it was, that was a tremendous learning experience for me. I did a lot of study afterwards about how we should be doing things to be effective as a team, in contrast to what I had seen on that project.
"In the years since that time I've been blessed to work on a lot of high-performing teams, sometimes by accident and sometimes as a result of focused effort. One of the biggest contrasts was on a project which was frankly a much more adverse environment. We were walking into a project that had been perennially failing. We were the fourth team to come into that environment and there were a host of issues, from failing test suites and broken functionality to lack of documentation and many other things. We had a very small, focused, and determined team with a strong vision from our leadership and strong support for us to be brutally honest with the customer and tell them what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear, unlike what they'd been hearing from previous teams.
"There were some inexperienced folks on the team, but we communicated constantly and effectively to support each other. There was no pride or siloed responsibilities like "this is my job. That's your job." We did whatever needed to be done. We identified issues, prioritized them, and we made implementing a continuous integration process a priority. In contrast, all the previous teams had not made continuous integration a priority and thus had failed because there was a lack of transparency and visibility into all the impacts of the metadata and the code. It was a very sprawling and monolithic architecture. But we were able to move from a state of extreme dysfunction and an inability to deploy into production because things were so broken to having a stable, if not yet healthy, environment and codebase within a matter of just a couple of months. From there we were able to move forward to developing new functionality and working through some really difficult migration and implementation issues together.
"It was the combination of the tooling that we implemented and radical transparency, honesty, trust and communication that allowed us to show them exactly where the issues were and what we were doing to resolve them."
Read 3 Keys to Building High-Performing DevOps Teams - Part 3
Industry News
Komodor announced the integration of the Komodor platform with Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), starting with built-in support for Backstage and Port.
Operant AI announced Woodpecker, an open-source, automated red teaming engine, that will make advanced security testing accessible to organizations of all sizes.
As part of Summer '25 Edition, Shopify is rolling out new tools and features designed specifically for developers.
Lenses.io announced the release of a suite of AI agents that can radically improve developer productivity.
Google unveiled a significant wave of advancements designed to supercharge how developers build and scale AI applications – from early-stage experimentation right through to large-scale deployment.
Red Hat announced Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite, a new addition to Red Hat OpenShift, the hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, designed to improve developer productivity and application security with enhancements to speed the adoption of Red Hat AI technologies.
Perforce Software announced Perforce Intelligence, a blueprint to embed AI across its product lines and connect its AI with platforms and tools across the DevOps lifecycle.
CloudBees announced CloudBees Unify, a strategic leap forward in how enterprises manage software delivery at scale, shifting from offering standalone DevOps tools to delivering a comprehensive, modular solution for today’s most complex, hybrid software environments.
Azul and JetBrains announced a strategic technical collaboration to enhance the runtime performance and scalability of web and server-side Kotlin applications.
Docker, Inc.® announced Docker Hardened Images (DHI), a curated catalog of security-hardened, enterprise-grade container images designed to meet today’s toughest software supply chain challenges.
GitHub announced that GitHub Copilot now includes an asynchronous coding agent, embedded directly in GitHub and accessible from VS Code—creating a powerful Agentic DevOps loop across coding environments.
Red Hat announced its integration with the newly announced NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design, helping to power a new wave of agentic AI innovation.
JFrog announced the integration of its foundational DevSecOps tools with the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design.
GitLab announced the launch of GitLab 18, including AI capabilities natively integrated into the platform and major new innovations across core DevOps, and security and compliance workflows that are available now, with further enhancements planned throughout the year.