DevOps is becoming unavoidable

Sorry professional Developers, Testers, DBAs, BAs, PMs and IT Ops people. It’s with a heavy heart that I must say that it is time to move on in your careers.

After of over a decade of my promoting Agile ways of working and testing as a profession, 2020 is now more than ever going to be the year that YOU need to change.

It was nearly 4 years ago, I started talking about cross-functional teams and T-Shaped people ( https://medium.com/@MRAJPalmer/army-of-one-ab2a477b8251) but in retrospect, it’s not become mass market in the way we expected.

DevOps is more than a trend now, and I know it’s been coming for a long long time, but infrastructure as code, CICD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery) and end to end automation are the sustained direction of travel. DevOps is the solution (the latest silver bullet?) for business priorities: faster time to market, higher technology ROI and faster responsiveness to change.

Why now?

It’s been 12 years since the DevOps concept was proposed, it’s 7 years since the first publication of the Phoenix Project. But DevOps has more than cultural support and a bit of longevity on it’s side.

Technology as an enabler has the reached the tipping point. Each of the traditional job roles listed earlier are being eroded by automation:

• Development — AI predictive coding and automated builds and deployments with code management tools and containers are making coding faster and more robust.
• Data and Databases — Autonomous Databases (https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database.html and AI are delivering intelligent data management
• Business Requirements — OK, so we haven’t replaced talking to people for UX, but BDD and the evolution of User Story Management has transformed requirements definition into a continuous activity.
• Project Management — Is now virtual, with remote teams and automated reporting. Teams are self-managing and self actualizing. ChatOps is now a thing.
• Operations — Business analytics, monitoring, alerting, change management and support are now performed by a wealth of available market tools that send notifications straight to the team. It’s all just managed data now.
• Testing — Probably the people most familiar with automation and we should be least surprised by it’s success. We already take User Testing activities and create regression Selenium tests from them, DevOps now takes this approach to every part of the delivery life cycle.

Technology as a service has reached a tipping point too. Technology, IT and Digital teams are front and centre of successful organisations. Technology is integrated into business from the CIO, CDO and CTO on the board, right down to the product delivery teams on the ground. Technology led businesses are building technology products, monitizing data, fulfilling market demands and generating share value.

Retailer? Technology and data manage your supply chain and tell you what to put where in the (online) store — and take the payments for it.

Bank? Technology delivers information to your customers, intelligently manages your assets, reacts faster to the world and forecasts your future

Doctor? Technology diagnoses your patient, dispenses your prescriptions and projects your demand.

2020 is when DevOps goes to market. It becomes stable and structured more than the many flavours of Agile ever have. We must appreciate what Agile has taught us and that DevOps is an evolution of Agile, but is a much needed and more efficient Agile way of working.

Am I Now Unemployed ?

So, you’ve spent the past ten years working your way through your technology career path from Junior to Lead with a passion for technology. You know your field, kept up-to-date with libraries, tools and have an Agile certificate. You should be set for life.

You know you can’t afford to stop learning. From Java 2 to Java 8, from V Model to Scrum you have grown with the industry. You now need to keep learning.

But you need to look beyond your core technical skill set and become cross-functional. I won’t repeat what a cross-functional team or a T-Shaped person looks like. Suffice to say, you need to cross skill NOW. Know Test Automation? then learn build tools. Love Development? then learn how to write better enhanced unit test. Be in a position where you can fill in for anyone else in your team. Don’t let there be any point where you are waiting for someone else to do something. As a result your team will be smaller, more manageable, more efficient and deliver faster. You can maintain your deep technical specialism, but you also share it with the team.

Your interpersonal skills need to grow too. Creativity, communication and learning are opportunities to improve. Be prepared to sit in front of users as much as in front of a keyboard. Be an active listener, know how to make an effective presentation, be able to tell stories of what you have achieved and what you have learned. The code belongs to everyone now and you all have to live with it. Share everything, the hard work and the rewards.

So, embrace your new job title of DevOps Engineer and let me know how it goes. If you need any help feel free to reach out to me, I’m always happy to have a chat.

Happy New Year

Andrew

@MrAJPalmer

A Few Useful Links:

Test Automation: https://testautomationu.applitools.com/

A beginner’s guide to building DevOps pipelines with open source tools: https://opensource.com/article/19/4/devops-pipeline

Kubernetes Basics: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/

How To Conduct User Experience Research Like A Professional: https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/how-to-conduct-user-experience-research-like-a-professional/

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Andrew Palmer is a Chartered IT Professional by the British Computer Society and Senior Testing Manager for Mastek in the UK ( https://www.mastek.com/).

Andrew has been a specialist in software testing for over 10 year working in both the Private and Public sector to deliver high quality software solutions.

Twitter: @MRAJPalmer