Many moons ago, someone mentioned to me that IRC and XMPP could be run by development and operations groups to communicate with each other as well interact with solutions. At that time, CampFire was mentioned. At that time, I couldn't find much reference to the concept.
It has now obtained some popularity. Companies such as PagerDuty are embracing it and spread the word through a blog post: So, What is ChatOps? And How do I Get Started?. They create a definition:
ChatOps, a term widely credited to GitHub, is all about conversation-driven development. By bringing your tools into your conversations and using a chat bot modified to work with key plugins and scripts, teams can automate tasks and collaborate, working better, cheaper and faster.
Here’s the 30,000-foot view: While in a chat room, team members type commands that the chat bot is configured to execute through custom scripts and plugins. These can range from code deployments to security event responses to team member notifications. The entire team collaborates in real-time as commands are executed.
The article references a number of solutions, and since I am more of Python fan, a tool called err has been created, with source code on github. It is IRC and XMPP compatible, has multiple chat rooms, and an extensive array of plugins.
Some teams function through verbal conversations, and therefore team members must be located near each other. But if team members are located in various parts of a building, or even around the world, communication must take on a different form, and is usually supported by a series of tools. ChatOps tool fit into that perspective.
PagerDuty further discussed Remote Work in a blog article: Remote Work in Ops.
There is a book on Remote
A web site providing a list of 9 tools to keep our remote team together: Slack, Sqwiggle, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, BaseCamp, Asana, iDoneThis, 15five, Screenhero.
To wrap it all up: A Day of Communication at GitHub.
2017/11/14: addition: 7 open source frameworks for ChatOps compared discusses seven chatbots: Hubot (CoffeeScript), Lita (Ruby), Errbot (Python), Nestor (JavaScript), Jarvis (JVM), Lazlo (Go), and Chato.ps.