Understanding DevOps Education with Grounded Theory

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. Therefore, 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.