September 10, 2015

ChatOps Extravaganza With Jason Hand, Sasha Rosenbaum, and Peter Burkholder

46 minutes

Recording Live from DevOpsDays Chicago!

ChatOps is used by many teams and companies as the main communication tool for day to day chat, and their most important activities. In fact, ChatOps may be taking the place of email in the workplace for internal communication for tech teams as it helps communication during DevOps activities like deploys, code pushes, etc. This episode discusses best practices (if there are any) of ChatOps and how to make sure you are getting the most from your team communication tools.

Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Communication

25% of the work week is spent managing your inbox. You can actually increase productivity by moving to Sync communication…we think.

Sasha: ChatOps creates an enormous amount of noise while at the same time makes communication grouped and searchable.

Discussion suggests it is up to the user to mediate that noise, but is it the user, the culture, or the conversation itself that dictates the role of chat? Tivo is given as an example of user mediation: you recorded a shit ton of stuff, and watched only what you wanted.

The panel comes to the conclusion that important decisions should lean away from ChatOps, and into a more formal, permanent form of communication. “Important things will ‘re-bubble’ again,” but the chatroom is not the place if a team consensus is needed, especially if the team is remote.

Create a culture where ChatOps is used in the way you need.

Risky to go “Super Pendulum Swing” in one direction or the other.

What is ChatOps good at?

Solving the communication problem.

Brings everybody into the same experience. Even if you are across Europe, or accross the room, you are having the same experience.

Great for in the moment Q & A.

Even with one on one questions, if the answer is shared in a public channel, the information is given to all on the team which moderates the need for repeated questions, and increases team efficiency. You need to be constantly pairing. If you direct message someone, you are keeping that information from the team. “If you are not working in your chat tool, you are not collaborating.”

Shared History

Makes communication searchable, and organized by topic, or at least team.

Rooms should be broken down to their smallest parts. Topics, Meetings, Projects, they should all be open spaces for all departments.

Getting messages/alerts from integrated tools is perhaps one of the most important features of ChatOps in DevOps: Jenkins, Github, Travis, etc.

What’s the Problem?

There are just too many messages. But they are necessary messages.

Internal ChatOps tool is almost useless when you are a consultant and you are all working on different clients.

Problems with Adoption?

In your organization, if you are considering chat tools for different purposes, use benchmarking and measurements to monitor your usage and data in each tool (in this case, chat vs. email)

Matt uses RescueTime (https://www.rescuetime.com/) religiously. His current rate of email vs Slack: 4 Hours in Slack, 48 minutes in email.

Sales, Support, etc. prefer email, but that will not change until their tools are integrated with Slack as well.

How to make use for permanent communication?

Have you adopted ChatOps for sustained messages and conversations that need to be kept?

Pinned Items are like the refrigerator…it’s emptied at the end of the week.

If it should live longer than a week, then it gets moved to the wiki, google doc, or the most appropriate space for the info.

How do you practice Chat-Zero? (Comment with your answer)

How do you go through every message in your chat?

How do you know what is important?

Last Thoughts:

Peter can’t wait for computers to be smart enough to interrupt us only when appropriate. “Who is the least invested in their work right now? Let’s notify that person.”

If you are considering it, do it. But be careful what you use, and how you use it.

Jason: It’s new tech, but its the old problem. ChatOps is just the newest efficiency on the line.

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By Matt Stratton, Trevor Hess, Jessica Kerr, and Bridget Kromhout

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