Just about every organization with a functioning IT department has been attempting to finesse some variation of DevOps into its software delivery flow.
When done right, DevOps is powerful stuff, and delivers very noticeable results -- automating the testing and quality assurance aspect, for example, can deliver ROI up to 250% to 300% month over month, according to Chris DeGonia, director of QA at International SOS. In a recent podcast[1] with Kalyan Rao Konda, president and head of the North America East business unit at Cigniti, he credits the ability to automate the flow, across repeatable processes, checks, and balances in the system.
While automation enables DevOps proliferation, it takes people with the right skills and mindsets to make things happen, DeGonia and Konda emphasize. The mindset is important, as "apart from having the general know-how of software testing and application functionality, the test engineers are now required to continuously increase their knowledge base on the latest trends and tools. DevOps implementation is pushing the test engineers to keep learning more and more about newer technology."
Skills key required for DevOps success include "networking knowledge, basic unique scripting, the ability to work with continuous integration and continuous delivery tools such as Jenkins, performance testing tools, and also having decent understanding of containers," Kalyan says. "Test engineers would also need to have a fair understanding of the role of cloud and how cloud services are being used in the development and hosting of the products or applications."
Having a DevOps mindset is critical here, Kaylan continues. "There's the need to promote collaboration within and among teams to ensure correct DevOps implementation. The testing activities are tightly integrated into the software development lifecycle in a DevOps ecosystem. This requires multiple