DevOps Isn't Only About Tools, It's About Teams and How They Collaborate
May 12, 2022

Jack McCurdy
Gearset

DevOps is not a tool in itself. You can't download it. It is made up of tools and methods and a whole way of working — the DevOps culture.

At its core, DevOps is about creating an open, regular flow between operations and development — and therefore clear communication and collaboration is essential. With demand increasing to build innovative systems to attract and retain customers, a cohesive DevOps culture can be the differentiator that puts you at the forefront of commercial growth.

DevOps Is Not a Tool, It’s a Culture That Needs People Like You

So what does this mean for developing your career in DevOps? Well crucially, it means that so-called "softer" skills around people management and communication are as much in demand as technical knowledge of tools such as GitHub (source control) or Puppet (monitoring).

Team Collaboration and Communication Is Vital to DevOps Success

Gearset's State of Salesforce DevOps Survey 2022 — of which the results are relevant to any DevOps practice — highlighted the importance of collaboration at the core of creating a successful DevOps culture. 93% of survey respondents cited collaboration as one of the most valuable benefits of DevOps — while 36% stated that challenges within teams — including collaboration — was one of their biggest blockers. It's clear that putting some time into developing your collaborative skills can have a real impact on the success of your team's DevOps journey.

Everyone Talks, Everyone Listens and Everyone Acts

Many teams are moving on from developers sitting in silos. With DevOps this is a core part of the culture — everybody owns the successes, the challenges and the solutions — and communicating effectively across functions, departments and roles is key to this collaboration.

The really big change with DevOps — in contrast to a linear waterfall development culture — is that collaboration has to happen between teams who may have previously worked with an imaginary wall between themselves. Agile developers and testers originally started pushing for more feedback from operations and admin to support faster development and, in time, a whole DevOps culture developed from those principles.

Automation Works Best with Inter-Team Communication and Understanding

Automation is without doubt one of the big wins for DevOps, reducing repetitive tasks in areas like testing, making it easier to work with huge data volumes or enabling continuous integration and development. However, as much as you can upskill in core DevOps tasks like automation, it doesn't work longer-term without people knowing what they are doing with it; monitoring what happens, responding correctly and, of course, communicating with others on their finding and solutions.

DevOps processes are supported and maintained by skilled, trained people like you. When everyone collaborates and communicates clearly, DevOps automation is at its most effective.

Jack McCurdy is a Salesforce DevOps Advocate at Gearset
Share this

Industry News

May 15, 2025

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.

May 15, 2025

Perforce Software is partnering with Siemens Digital Industries Software to transform how smart, connected products are designed and developed.

May 15, 2025

Reply launched Silicon Shoring, a new software delivery model powered by Artificial Intelligence.

May 15, 2025

CIQ announced the tech preview launch of Rocky Linux from CIQ for AI (RLC-AI), an operating system engineered and optimized for artificial intelligence workloads.

May 14, 2025

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the launch of the Cybersecurity Skills Framework, a global reference guide that helps organizations identify and address critical cybersecurity competencies across a broad range of IT job families; extending beyond cybersecurity specialists.

May 14, 2025

CodeRabbit is now available on the Visual Studio Code editor.

The integration brings CodeRabbit’s AI code reviews directly into Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code at the earliest stages of software development—inside the code editor itself—at no cost to the developers.

May 14, 2025

Chainguard announced Chainguard Libraries for Python, an index of malware-resistant Python dependencies built securely from source on SLSA L2 infrastructure.

May 14, 2025

Sysdig announced the donation of Stratoshark, the company’s open source cloud forensics tool, to the Wireshark Foundation.

May 13, 2025

Pegasystems unveiled Pega Predictable AI™ Agents that give enterprises extraordinary control and visibility as they design and deploy AI-optimized processes.

May 13, 2025

Kong announced the introduction of the Kong Event Gateway as a part of their unified API platform.

May 13, 2025

Azul and Moderne announced a technical partnership to help Java development teams identify, remove and refactor unused and dead code to improve productivity and dramatically accelerate modernization initiatives.

May 13, 2025

Parasoft has added Agentic AI capabilities to SOAtest, featuring API test planning and creation.

May 13, 2025

Zerve unveiled a multi-agent system engineered specifically for enterprise-grade data and AI development.

May 12, 2025

LambdaTest, a unified agentic AI and cloud engineering platform, has announced its partnership with MacStadium, the industry-leading private Mac cloud provider enabling enterprise macOS workloads, to accelerate its AI-native software testing by leveraging Apple Silicon.

May 12, 2025

Tricentis announced a new capability that injects Tricentis’ AI-driven testing intelligence into SAP’s integrated toolchain, part of RISE with SAP methodology.