Insights

Foundations of DevOps is launched

Assurity has developed and launched a new course – Foundations of DevOps – to meet the ever-increasing demand for DevOps-related offerings. This is the first class in the ICAgile DevOps track and will give successful students an ICP-FDO (ICAgile Certified Professional Foundations of DevOps) certificate.

Foundations of DevOps is launched

Date: 13 March 2018

Assurity has developed and launched a new course – Foundations of DevOps – to meet the ever-increasing demand for DevOps-related offerings. This is the first class in the ICAgile DevOps track and will give successful students an ICP-FDO (ICAgile Certified Professional Foundations of DevOps) certificate.

We can deliver the two-day course anywhere in  New Zealand – at our training rooms in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch) or on-site at your organisation.

If you’re not part of a larger organisation and would like to sign up as an individual, we’ll be offering a public class in Auckland on 14-15 May, Wellington on 28-29 May and Christchurch on 7-8 August – sign up soon to take advantage of our 20% early bird discount.

The class is highly interactive. We are big believers in the concept of conversational learning and we also all like Sharon Bowman’s Training from the Back of the Room, so expect training that’s focused on innovative, interactive ways of learning and not on simple lecturing. We will depend on our class members to share their experience and knowledge so the whole class can learn from the conversation.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the study of the specific cultural and technical practices that high-performing organisations use to deliver higher quality software faster. Instead of releasing software once a year, putting a single release through separate teams dedicated to testing, security, and operations, DevOps seeks to eliminate this arduous process through adopting patterns that allow software to be released and measured reliably and continuously. This class covers the practices and patterns that high-performing teams adopt to accomplish this goal.

How we developed the course

Our DevOps team spent considerable effort discussing and reflecting on what the motifs of the course should be. We knew we wanted to cover the specific practices of high-performing teams, such as continuous integration and deployment, various forms of infrastructure configuration and virtualisation, and the adoption of various families of tools. But we also knew that, as a fundamentals class, delving too deeply into these topics would likely be lost on many of our audience.

To address this challenge, we deliver the course in a way that caters to the attendees’ experience levels. Before every class, students must complete a ‘training needs analysis’ questionnaire to give us some insight into their experience, as well as the interests they have in delivering high-quality software faster.

The course agenda

With this information in hand, our team decides how to present material that will best tell the DevOps story to the class. The result is a highly tailored curriculum that augments a team with the knowledge they need to optimise their DevOps transformation.

We use the Three Ways of DevOps as a major motif of the course. We discuss in detail how feedback at all levels of an organisation leads to a more collaborative culture that delivers working software faster, as well as various ways that value can be released faster – such that customers benefit quicker and more reliably.

We also talk about various cultural tenets and tools that high-performing teams use to encourage atmospheres of innovation, experimentation and learning. The three ways (i.e. Flow, Feedback, Continuous Experimentation and Learning) succinctly describes three fundamental patterns of high-performing teams that we want to make sure comes across in the class.

We also seek to generalise those patterns to a general rule of thumb. All three ways are attempts to optimise the communication and performance of a team or organisation. We felt there was a way we could generalise this idea, this feeling of DevOps, of being in a high-performing team or organisation.

Additionally, we’ve developed a simulation that illustrates the effects various DevOps patterns can have on delivering value to customers. The DevOps simulation is a fun, illustrative way to show the class exactly how it feels to be on a DevOps-enabled team. So expect some innovation games to drive home the concepts of DevOps.

Attendees of our first course said…

“Excellent delivery. It was clear the instructors had real-life experience with DevOps and their stories added a lot to the effectiveness of the course”  

“I will try and encourage faster feedback loops [at my work], and have those regular conversations with the team to be able to achieve this”

“It is good to get an understanding of what DevOps is so we can be involved in the conversations related to DevOps and suggest it where appropriate”

Share Article

Want to know more?

Want to be inspired?

Want to learn?

Want to get in touch?

Share on Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Twitter
Share on Instagram
Follow on YouTube