With DevOps becoming the norm in software development, organisers must move their existing employees (devs and testers) to processes and methods more aligned with DevOps practices. This article will look at four core elements that must be studied, internalised, and practiced by DevOps engineers. Think of them as the basic DevOps training prerequisites.
What is DevOps?
DevOps applies Agile practices to QA and Ops teams, thus streamlining build, validation, deployment, and development of software. It seeks to standardise development environments and improve predictability, efficiency, and security in the software development lifecycle.
DevOps Engineer Prerequisites
Note: In a DevOps landscape, devs and testers work in consistent and close collaboration. Often, their roles overlap — testers must have an idea of development principles, and devs must know, at least, the rudiments of testing. Because of this, the prerequisites for DevOps-ready testers and developers will be similar.
- Expertise with programming languages
Any developer will need to know the languages of their craft. But DevOps professionals need to write code as well as handle software installation, configuration, and validation. They must also be able to write code that enables the automation of essential processes, testing in particular. This means they should know what they are doing when working with the most commonly used programming languages — Java, Python, Pearl, etc.
- Expertise with automation tools
Anyone seeking to implement DevOps principles should have considerable hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-a-Code frameworks, which translates to the usage of configuration management technology. Tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet, Bamboo TeamCity are at the top of this list.
DevOps testers, in particular, would be served best when using a real device cloud that provides integrations with popular CI/CD tools. This includes tools such as Jira, Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis CI, and much more. Look for cloud Selenium grid real browsers and devices for testing purposes.
- Collaboration and Communication
When moving to a DevOps style of work, devs and testers will have to move beyond their predetermined roles.Testers must be involved in a project from the beginning; developers must pay heed to their input and take testing protocols into account when designing code. Developers must also run preliminary unit tests on their code before pushing it to version control so that basic bugs can be done away with.
Similarly, testers must gain knowledge of development so that when they encounter a bug, they can identify it better, understand its nature, and return it to devs with some helpful information. Since testers have to design test cases for the Continuous Testing phase of the CI/CD pipeline, they must also understand how development works and what the software must do for its users.
The prerequisites for DevOps testers, often the same as those for DevOps engineers, ensure that a team can work on the same page in a similar professional and technical direction. Look for these qualities in prospective employees for a DevOps team, or shape training modules for existing employees in a way that lets them learn, excel, and apply these skills every single day.
