For people at Atlassian, the word DevOps is synonymous with work practice. As the team that brought us JIRA and Confluence, Atlassian has recently launched an interactive website called DevOps Dojo, where it shares thoughts on the cultural and technical aspects of adopting the DevOps way of developing software.

Recently, Atlassian started a new community event series called the Open Dojo where four Atlassians joined a Google Hangout and talked about various challenges faced by distributed teams who decide to embrace DevOps principles. The Hangout sparked interesting discussion on a wide range of DevOps topics such as DevOps culture, tools, and technologies.

Right from DevOps Fallacy, practices for effective DevOps and DevOps tools to hiring tips and things to be prevented, the conversation had it all that is required for best DevOps implementation. Let’s take a quick look at some interesting things discussed there.

Hiring for DevOps

Everyone needs a person having DevOps in the résumé, but the dilemma remains on how to find such person. So, the very first thing to look for is how good the developer is at Open Source chop. Having projects on Github and exposure to Cloud terms with respect to project are good points to start. Plus, good knowledge of Chef and Puppet, the two most popular configuration management systems is a must. Not to forget thorough understanding of all big relational databases and NoSQL databases.

Prevent Mistakes

DevOps greatly helps delivering value to customers faster and more reliably, but there are some common mistakes associated with its implementation. Some of the common mistakes that IT people do are not planning for a scale, not performing automated tests and unit testing, and lack of proper resource utilization. The worst and the most common one is forgetting 5Ws of development process, i.e., what’s in the build, where it should be deployed, what are the test results, and who is going to do what.

Best Practices

Exactly opposite to mistakes done by Developer and Operation teams, there are some best practices to be followed. Quite easy to guess, these include facilitating active stakeholder participation, continuous integration and deployment, and have integrated configuration management, deployment planning and change management.

The key of successful DevOps implementation lies in breeding the DevOps culture in the entire organization. Following agile development practices is a good point to start, but the way teams work is the primary determinant of success when it comes to adopting an effective DevOps strategy. This again nails down to bringing DevOps culture in an organization.