Those of you with a global remote staff: Does your team need to work in the same general time zone (+/- a few hours) to be effective? How important is co-location to successful DevOps?
No
>How important is co-location to successful DevOps?
It is not that important .
It is not strictly necessary to work in the same general time zone to be effective, although it can help in certain situations. The importance of co-location and time zone alignment in a successful DevOps environment depends on various factors such as communication, collaboration, company culture, tools and processes.
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Limited environment/Infrastructure resources31%
Inability to quickly identify the root cause of CI/CD pipeline failures45%
Lack of standardized CI/CD pipeline templates across the organization53%
Integrating security tools - inefficient security implementation leading to false positives38%
Poor communication across business and product teams/coordination challenges26%
Cost/resource management26%
Implementation of CI/CD into on-going projects and workflows22%
Internal resistance: training issues, culture, etc.14%
Inefficient implementation of CI/CD due to lack of expertise, poor training, etc.19%
Poorly written unit and acceptance testing9%
We are not doing regression testing10%
25% manual, 75% automated50%
50% manual, 50% automated27%
100% manual, 0% automated8%
Don't know2%
organized a virtual escape room via https://www.puzzlebreak.us/ - even though his team lost it was a fun subtitue for just a "virtual happy hour"
To make joint working sessions possible, some team members had to work during non-core hours, which often meant joining calls in the middle of the night. I have lost count of how many calls I hosted that started at 11 pm my local time and went on until 1 am, 2 am, or even 3 am. In my opinion, this kind of schedule is unsustainable for long-term projects.
On the other hand, from an operations standpoint, having a more diverse team with members from different time zones can be beneficial. It means that fewer people have to be on-call during non-core hours, allowing for a more rested team overall. With wider time zone coverage, the team can work and troubleshoot during their most alert hours, which can lead to more efficient operations. I believe that it is possible to work successfully with a DevOps team spread across many time zones, but the impact of non-core hours needs to be addressed upfront and fairly distributed across all time zones
And to clarify one more point, even within CENTRAL TIME ZONE, most people did not work in the same city or state. We were early remote collaborators, but did it over the phone and with very crude screen sharing. The issue is really Time ZONE related, not physical location related.