DevOps - Preparing Students for Professional Practice

This work in progress paper presents a course on DevOps which is a combination of software development skills and software operations skills. This new course is for sophomores and juniors in the computer science program who want to be prepared for professional software engineering careers. Introduction to DevOps Is a hands-on laboratory course that brings students through Git for source code management, Capybara for automated testing, AWS, Docker, and Ansible for automated virtual machine provisioning and configuration, and Jenkins for Continuous Integration. Unlike our current course offerings which primarily focus on the single developer context in a localized environment, this course prepares students for highly collaborative, team-based projects that use cloud resources to facilitate management of the software deployment pipeline. We developed this course based on feedback from our external advisory board and under consultation from a number of industrial partners. This is complementary to our current offerings in software engineering which focus on Agile software practices. In this paper we describe the core concepts, the design, learning experiences, technologies, and lessons learned through developing and conducting this course. In future work we hope to present student perceptions of learning and provide data collected through direct assessment of student outcomes.