Devops Educators Workshop

1-day Workshop on Nov 19, 2016, Northeastern University, Seattle Campus

The workshop has been moved to 401 terry Ave N., see you at 9am!

Why This Workshop

DevOps and Rapid Deployment have quickly become established practice in large software companies. The goal of these practices is to bring smaller features to the end user faster, without sacrificing quality. They rely on a combination of choosing the right software architecture, deployment process and tool chain. While large companies have developed their current DevOps and rapid deployment methodology largely from scratch -- by training employees on the fly -- they have done this out of necessity. There is a very limited supply of experienced, knowledgeable deployment engineers to keep up the process. Similarly, small and medium sized enterprises and startups want developers trained in DevOps and Rapid Deployment principles to quickly make strides.

However, standard university and college curricula largely skip the idea of deployment and operations, and rarely expose students to a complete continuous deployment pipeline. The goal of this one day workshop is to bring together university faculty who are interested in teaching DevOps and Rapid Deployment to share ideas and materials. There is no cost for attending the workshop but it is restricted to professional educators and prior registration is required.

How It Works

The format of this full-day workshop will be flexible. The three organizers( @Dr.Len Bass @Dr.Bram Adams @Dr. Christopher Parnin) will start off presenting their syllabi, after which any attendees who have experience teaching this material are also encouraged to present. We also hope to get industry representatives to present the industrial needs. After the presentations, there will be in depth discussions of topics related to instructional issues. We expect these topics will include such issues as resources available, exercises assigned, and so forth. The exact topics will be decided by the attendees after the presentations. The workshop is intended to allow attendees to share their experiences and gain advice in the teaching of DevOps and Release Engineering topics.

The three organizers have all taught courses in DevOps or Release Engineering in their respective universities. They presented a panel at the most recent Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training where it became clear that a) there was a desire to incorporate the material, b) there was a lack of knowledge of DevOps and Release Engineering and c) the materials (texts and tools) useful in teaching the material were unfamiliar to many faculty. This workshop is an attempt to build a community of faculty interested in the subject and in teaching DevOps or Release Engineering topics.

  • Release engineering

    What is release engineering and which activities need to be performed? What are today's challenges for the build and integration phases of release engineering? How does our work fit with these challenges?

  • DevOps

    DevOps is a practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other IT professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.