Engineering Support Teams (DevOps)

In agile environments, product owners that aren't in touch with development or who are not familiar with engineering practices always seem to push out of the backlog those technical stories that are required for a successful project.

Sometimes we need technical stories that allocate time to set up a CI project, or create a mocking framework, or create an environment, or some automated deployment scripts in order to continue developing and releasing a project. When we don’t have these mechanisms in place, we need to hope that we have a team that can pick up the functionality as we fire it out and position it into the deployment pipeline so that it will drop out happily into production.

Without these technical stories and engineering practices in place, the cycle time (time between conception and release of a story) climbs and we either never release, or if we do release, it’s a pressurised situation of manic updates done manually on live servers by technicians that may have no idea about the code they are deploying.

If you have multiple teams or programmes, and if you have the budget, an engineering support team is essential. This is a team that engages primarily in DevOps, but will also be domain experts capable of taking a holistic view of the project and identify any unforeseen issues.

You will often see this team type in large organisations, but in those organisations which may need them the most, i.e. those start ups that need to be capable of continuous delivery to keep ahead of the competition, it is usually never seen due to the difficulty in justifying a couple of heads working on technical stories instead of functionality. It takes a really technically savvy manager to understand and sell their worth to the business.

If you don’t have this team, and you are not afforded the necessary time to do technical user stories in your sprints or iterations, then you need to think outside of the box and form a group that can focus on these software engineering practices.

A software engineering group is one of these and is usually a selection of the most ambitious or creative engineers from your teams that are willing to get together on a regular basis to throw around current engineering problems and work on providing solutions between them. By utilising slack days, or lunch times, the team can fire through some of these completely necessary technical elements of the delivery pipeline and keep the cycle time down to a minimum.