- [Instructor] Welcome back. In this lecture we'll introduce you to the importance of collaboration. 

DevOps is a set of practices that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information technology professionals. 

Traditionally the development and operations teams worked independently on different priorities and schedules. To a degree these teams were often siloed and at times had conflicting agendas. Development were concerned with building new features and releasing change. Whereas operations were concerned with achieving stability and preventing change. With DevOps and as the name depicts, development and operations teams are expected to come together and collaborate. 

Collaboration is a key cultural shift required when adopting DevOps. An expectation of constant communication and real-time feedback between teams allows the organization as a whole to make rapid and continuous change. All the while keeping the supporting infrastructure stable and live. The number one success factor for embedding DevOps within your organization is culture. Building a culture based on collaboration and shared responsibility will provide a strong foundation for a high performing and successful DevOps team. 

Collaboration can be supported through the use of tools such as Slack, Jira and Trello, as quick examples. 

The benefits associated with ensuring good collaboration between development and operations include: improved transparency to support effective decision making. Improved agility to get things completed. Improved quality of deliverables. Improved end user experience of product and faster feedback loops. 

Some of the challenges encountered by not addressing the importance of collaboration amongst teams are team silos. Silos will continue to exist, where important information is not shared and impacts deliverables. Time wastage: endless and pointless meetings. Fall back to emails: excessive communication performed using email, which lacks the ability to get actionable results. Ineffective handoffs: teams are unable to establish effective work loads between themselves. Worker redundancy: same job tasks are unnecessarily repeated. Misaligned priorities: priorities are mismanaged, causing delays and finger pointing: no ownership of problems. 

Some example software tools that can aid in the ability to communicate and collaborate within a team are: Slack, a cloud-based collaboration tool. Jira provides bug tracking, issue tracking and project management functions. Trello, a web-based project management application and Mingle, project management tool that enables companies of all sizes to implement and scale Agile practices. 

The following DevOps build pipeline shows how to integrate continuous feedback into Slack. From which, can be used as a means to collaborate on the result by the various team members from development and operations. 

Collaboration is essential for DevOps to be embedded successfully within your organization. Ensure that all communication is open and honest and shared amongst the right team members with no hidden agendas. Collaboration and communication between teams and or individuals should be bi-directional with an emphasis on shared responsibility. Integrate feedback channels into your build and deployment pipelines and leverage tools such as slack to collate feedback into a unified view for consumption. 

Okay that completes this lecture on collaboration. Go ahead and close this lecture and we'll see you shortly in the next one.