Application of ChatOps as a collaboration platform

In application maintenance services, ticket handling teams are organized from L1 to L4 based on the skills required for ticket resolution. When there is an application outage, a ticket flows from L1 to L4, but there is always an ambiguity in terms of a single point of ownership. Who is the ticket escalated to is a major challenge for the earlier lines of defense. A ChatOps approach works well here, where a ticket is escalated to a group of people having a different type of skill sets and experiences. Anyone who identifies the problem can take ownership and solve it immediately. Integrated bots allow teams to perform some automated tasks trough commands.

Early involvement of the testing team has always been a challenge for projects. There are many situations, from requirement gathering to implementation of code and finally test. A group of cross-skilled testers in collaboration with the development team can help identify defects early. ChatOps provides that collaboration platform where testers and developers can experience the true DevOps culture and its bots feature works as an accelerator. Tasks such as deployment of code and running test scripts, can be executed through a chat window.

This type of conversion-driven development provides IT professionals, testers, engineers, and customers a better approach to communicate among themselves.