The Most Effective DevOps Team Structure: Separate But In Synch

DevOps performs best when Dev and Ops function as separate teams that collaborate closely, challenging one of the most common assumptions in DevOps culture: that integration always trumps separation. At least that’s what new research suggests.

For over a decade, DevOps has promised faster delivery, fewer failures, and tighter feedback loops. But while most organizations have invested heavily in automation and agile tools, fewer have paused to ask a foundational question: What team structure best supports DevOps success?

A new empirical study from Frontiers in Computer Science offers a rare, data-backed answer. “While DevOps is highly effective for companies to react to customer demands with fast and reliable software development and delivery, they still need to address coordination and collaboration among different teams in IT organizations,” the study says.

Based on responses from 104 DevOps professionals across multiple industries and geographies, the research compares four dominant team configurations, revealing not only which one delivers the highest performance but also why it works.

The study examined how different team formations performed across five key DevOps metrics: Lead Time (LT), Deployment Frequency (DF), Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), Number of Incidents (NoI), and Number of Failures (NoF). The four structures evaluated were:

• TeamType1: Siloed Dev and Ops, with minimal collaboration
• TeamType2: Dev and Ops in separate teams, but collaborating closely
• TeamType3: Dev and Ops teams supported by a central DevOps or platform team
• TeamType4: Fully integrated Dev+Ops teams

Not surprisingly, TeamType1 consistently underperformed while TeamType2 emerged as the standout performer. This high-collaboration, cross-functional model achieved the best outcomes across three of five metrics: deployment frequency, incident volume, and failure rate. It also demonstrated statistically significant improvements post-DevOps adoption—more so than even fully integrated teams.

In practice, TeamType2 shows that integration isn't a prerequisite for performance, but alignment is.

Altogether, these teams maintain clear functional boundaries between development and operations, while also embedding a culture of shared accountability. They prioritize joint planning, integrated monitoring, and constant communication. 

Interestingly, TeamType3, featuring a shared DevOps or platform team, ranked second in overall performance, particularly excelling in reducing lead time. This structure can scale well in larger organizations, where Dev and Ops teams rely on platform tooling and expertise to stay productive without duplicating effort.

TeamType4, the fully integrated model, performed well in mean time to recovery (MTTR), suggesting that blending responsibilities can speed up incident response. But it didn’t dominate in other areas, raising questions about the long-term viability of tightly coupled teams in complex environments.

TeamType1, traditional silos with minimal interaction, was the only structure that failed to show meaningful improvements after adopting DevOps practices. In fact, most of the expected gains in speed, stability, and recovery were negligible. The takeaway is blunt: DevOps cannot succeed without cultural change. Simply layering automation over old organizational patterns is a fast track to stagnation.

If your teams are siloed, integration may not be the immediate fix. Instead, focus on building high-collaboration systems, characterized by shared objectives, transparency, real-time data access, and mutual accountability. Consider creating DevOps facilitation roles or embedded SREs to foster alignment without restructuring entire departments.

For larger organizations, investing in a strong platform engineering team—as in TeamType3—can provide the infrastructure and tooling necessary to support multiple high-performing teams without sacrificing autonomy or consistency.

DevOps is actually an organizational behavior model, not merely a technical framework that can be replicated without any consideration for the human aspect. The success of pipelines, tools, and incident response workflows depends less on their technical architecture and more on how teams work together. The highest-performing DevOps environments aren’t necessarily the most integrated, but for sure they’re the most collaborative. And that’s a cultural decision, not a structural one.