In this chat we spoke with Prem Chandraskearan, VP of Software engineering at Barclaycard. Prem has led the DevOps transformation there. He sums up his learning with this:

The best way for an organization to approach DevOps is from a collaborative angle. When development and operations experts actively work together in a cohesive effort, solutions are well designed, efficient and smart from both a development and maintenance perspective. When operations is viewed as a software problem, Dev and Ops can work in tandem to implement a tool that is holistically a part of the process from start to finish.

DevOps is always a work in progress, but the initiative can only improve with quality resources that implement a variety of backgrounds and perspectives on both Dev and Ops working together. Barclaycard has had some interesting challenges with DevOps due to being in the credit card/banking industry, so for example, the “you build it, you run it” mantra doesn’t work as well for us as it would for other enterprises implementing DevOps. It is definitely a learning curve, and our goals and best practices are still coming to fruition, but we are continuing to find ways to automate.

The best way to get teams to work together is to simply ensure that they are not in silos, meaning that if there are distinct dev and ops teams, they must spend time in each other’s sectors to understand the pains, how the functions work, what makes it tick, etc. When the development and maintenance perspective are strategized in tandem, it automatically makes for a better, more streamlined workflow.

The best way to ensure a DevOps initiative’s long-term success is to ensure that the foundation of the program is collaborative and understanding of how each function works. With this, automation testing for failure is imperative to discover problems that are typically only otherwise found in production. If all the bases are covered and the process is streamlined and collaborative, the overall quality of your DevOps function will be much higher.