Understanding DevOps Education with Grounded Theory

Candy Pang, Abram Hindle, Denilson Barbosa

2020/01/15

Understanding DevOps Education with Grounded Theory

Authors

Candy Pang, Abram Hindle, Denilson Barbosa

Venue

Abstract

DevOps stands for Development-Operations. It arises from the IT industry as a movement aligning development and operations teams. DevOps is broadly recognized as an IT standard, and there is high demand for DevOps practitioners in industry. Since ACM & IEEE suggest that undergraduate computer science curricula “must adequately prepare [students] for the workforce”, we studied whether undergraduates acquired adequate DevOps skills to fulfill the demand for DevOps practitioners in industry. We employed Grounded Theory (GT), a social science qualitative research methodology, to study DevOps education from academic and industrial perspectives. In academia, academics were not motivated to learn or adopt DevOps, and we did not find strong evidence of academics teaching DevOps. Academics need incentives to adopt DevOps, in order to stimulate interest in teaching DevOps. In industry, DevOps practitioners lack clearly defined roles and responsibilities, for the DevOps topic is diverse and growing too fast. Therefore, practitioners can only learn DevOps through hands-on working experience. As a result, academic institutions should provide fundamental DevOps education (in culture, procedure, and technology) to prepare students for their future DevOps advancement in industry. Based on our findings, we proposed five groups of future studies to advance DevOps education in academia.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{pang2020ICSESeet-Devops,
 abstract = {DevOps stands for Development-Operations. It arises from the IT industry as a movement aligning development and operations teams. DevOps is broadly recognized as an IT standard, and there is high demand for DevOps practitioners in industry. Since ACM & IEEE suggest that undergraduate computer science curricula "must adequately prepare [students] for the workforce", we studied whether undergraduates acquired adequate DevOps skills to fulfill the demand for DevOps practitioners in industry. We employed Grounded Theory (GT), a social science qualitative research methodology, to study DevOps education from academic and industrial perspectives. In academia, academics were not motivated to learn or adopt DevOps, and we did not find strong evidence of academics teaching DevOps. Academics need incentives to adopt DevOps, in order to stimulate interest in teaching DevOps. In industry, DevOps practitioners lack clearly defined roles and responsibilities, for the DevOps topic is diverse and growing too fast. Therefore, practitioners can only learn DevOps through hands-on working experience. As a result, academic institutions should provide fundamental DevOps education (in culture, procedure, and technology) to prepare students for their future DevOps advancement in industry. Based on our findings, we proposed five groups of future studies to advance DevOps education in academia.},
 accepted = {2020-01-15},
 author = {Candy Pang and Abram Hindle and Denilson Barbosa},
 authors = {Candy Pang, Abram Hindle, Denilson Barbosa},
 booktitle = {2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering Education and Training Track},
 code = {pang2020ICSESeet-Devops},
 date = {2020-07-07},
 funding = {NSERC Discovery},
 location = {Seoul, South Korea},
 pagerange = {1--12},
 pages = {1--12},
 rate = {21/84 or 25%},
 role = {Co-Author},
 title = {Understanding DevOps Education with Grounded Theory},
 type = {inproceedings},
 url = {http://softwareprocess.ca/pubs/pang2020ICSESeet-Devops.pdf},
 venue = {2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering Education and Training Track},
 year = {2020}
}