The Benefits of ChatOps

In this module, we are going to take a look at the benefits of ChatOps. This should help you get excited about building a culture of ChatOps within your team and organization. If you are already sold on ChatOps, this module will give you some discussion points that you can use to convince others to adopt ChatOps. We will cover how ChatOps helps us centralize tasks, provide team visibility and a history of events, helps new team members get started, improves speed and remoting, and builds team culture.

Building a Culture of ChatOps

In the first module, we discussed how ChatOps is built on culture, automation, measurement, and sharing. To build a healthy ChatOps environment, we will need all four of these principles. However, the foundation of our ChatOps house is most definitely culture. Without proper culture, we will never get full team engagement and support, thus rendering time spent on automation, measurement, and sharing useless. How first you build this ChatOps culture depends largely on your team or organization size and your team members' personalities. For some teams, it might take months to get ChatOps into full swing. Thus, it is imperative to do it right from the start. This module serves as a roadmap to building a healthy ChatOps culture. We will start off by discussing the basic requirements of a chat application and how to foster team engagement. We will then discuss the three pillars of ChatOps culture--making it fun, informative, and productive. And, finally, we will talk about how you can reduce noise. Let's get started.

Choosing a Chat Application

In this module, we will discuss the various things to look at when choosing a chat application for ChatOps. But before I jump into the nitty-gritty details, let's look at the basic function that your chat application will serve. There are typically three integration points that you need to pay attention to. The first is communication with your team. This typically happens via email or via a chat room or in person. Secondly, there are many information streams that you need to pay attention to to do your job effectively. These streams include information on your team's practices and processes, as well as feedback on the health of the product that you are delivering. Finally, you have actions that you need to perform. These can include things like server maintenance or deployment of new products. These are typically things that you trigger manually. ChatOps leverages your chat application's features to consolidate this communication, information, and actions. To be successful at ChatOps, it is imperative that we choose a chat application that can help us consolidate all of these streams effectively. In this module, we will discuss the most important features to look for in a chat application, as well as the nice-to-haves for various scenarios.

Pushing Information into the Chat Room

In this module, we will discuss the various ways to start pushing information into our chat rooms via our chat application's API. This is a very easy way to start consolidating all the information regarding your team's process. Whether you are a developer, DevOps engineer, or a non-IT person, you can use these techniques to easily add value. We will look at the basics of posting directly to a chat room via the chat application's API, using preexisting chat application integrations, and, finally, using tools like If This Then That and Zapier to push information into your chat room. For this demo, I will be using Slack as my chat application. However, these techniques can be applied to any chat application that has an API. Let's look at an example to see what I mean by pushing information to a chat room.