Enterprise DevOps Skills Report - how team boundaries affect job roles
The DevOps Institute has published the Enterprise DevOps Skills Report 2019 covering the in-demand skills for software development in enterprises around the world.
The report outlines the most valued and in-demand skills needed to achieve DevOps transformation within enterprise IT organizations of all sizes.
The original DevOps Team Topologies - which ultimately led to our Team Topologies book - are mentioned in the report in the context of different kinds of teams to help make DevOps work. Here is an extract from the report showing the survey responses from most of the 1600+ people who took the survey:
Figure 5: The Majority Of DevOps Teams Leverage a Cross Functional Team as Topology - taken from Enterprise DevOps Skills Report 2019 and used with permission from DevOps Institute
What’s interesting from this research is that although a quarter (24%) of respondents are using what are effectively Stream-aligned teams to deliver DevOps approaches, almost as many (22%) are using a ‘DevOps Service Team’ - akin to some combination of Enabling team and Platform team.
11% of respondents are using a central IT team, but it’s unclear whether this is a true Platform team that treats Dev teams as customers: we’ll have to wait for the 2020 report with some additional questions inspired by Team Topologies for that!
Almost a fifth of respondents (19%) have a very ad-hoc approach to DevOps, and 11% replied “N/A” (meaning there was no answer that matched their current team setup). This shows the importance of clear definitions for roles, responsibilities, and (crucially) team interactions, something that is at the heart of Team Topologies. As the value of well-defined team interactions and team topologies becomes more widely understood, I think we’ll see more organisations adopting specific team patterns which in turn will shape the kind of job roles commonly sought.
