As teams grow, finding ways to effectively work together is vital. Communication across teams is challenging. We need to enable discovery of conversations and related information. Source code, scripts, configuration files, deployment docs and other related content also need to be centralized and versioned. Finally, teams need tooling that not only works across multiple project types and languages, but also facilitates remote-first collaboration.
Tailwind Traders has been growing and the developer and operations teams have become larger and more specialized. With differing goals and incentives, the directions of the teams has diverged and become more adversarial. Some of the more senior team members recognized what was happening and are trying to bring the teams back together.
The first step they are taking is to use shared tooling. By aligning the tools the teams are using, they create natural conversation and collaboration points. They use Teams as the hub for their work experience. They connect almost all other avenues of information into Teams – GitHub, documents, dashboards, OneNote, and more.
The next step is getting everything into source control. From industry research, the team knows that one of the keys to improving their development and operational experience is the use of source control for all production artifacts. Source control isn’t just another development tool, it’s a communication tool that helps facilitate conversations. With all our code, configuration, scripts, and other versionable documents in a git repository we can use tags, commit IDs, branches, and other identifiers to know what versions of things are being used when and where. We develop a history of how things have changed and, via pull requests, can have conversations about the evolution of these artifacts.
Finally, the team is transitioning everyone onto Visual Studio Code – with its strong support for Azure, GitHub, and every programming and scripting environment they work in – it was the logical choice. With GitHub and GitHub Codespaces, any team member from anywhere with almost any platform can be productive across their whole application portfolio. Visual Studio Live Share enables the remote team to collaborate almost as effectively as if they were sitting side by side and provides a great way for operations and development team members to "ride along" on tasks or while troubleshooting.
How do I work effectively with my development and operations teams?
- Make communication centralized and discoverable.
- Everything that can be versioned goes in source control.
- Pick tools that support your team’s workflow – including source control, remote collaboration, and language and project types.
- Source Control
- Communication and Collaboration
- Microsoft Teams
- Visual Studio Code
- GitHub Repos
- GitHub Codespaces