devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: soft skills

  • Best of 2020: 5 Project Management Skills Every Developer Should Have

    Best of 2020: 5 Project Management Skills Every Developer Should Have

    As we close out 2020, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the five most popular articles of the year. Following is the first in our series of the Best of 2020.

    The days of the siloed project manager and “skilled” development team are becoming a thing of the past, thanks to the increasing complexity of dev projects. In many cases, the knowledge gap between the project manager and the developer is large, making it nearly impossible for any non-technical person to effectively manage the entire scope without significant input from the development team.

    These days, every member has to have a basic level of project management skills to be able to contribute to the overall direction. With the days of Gantt charts behind us and more companies using project management software as they work from remote locations, all team members have better access to all of the components of the project and an expanded sense of responsibility.

    When the developers take an active role in the management of the overall project, the benefits are numerous. Not only do the developers have a better sense of how long each step of the process will take—and their contribution to the larger project—but they can also more accurately prioritize the crucial elements needed to take the project across the finish line or recognize where errors, scope creep or delays may derail a project. In short, individual team members become more active collaborators in delivering better, tighter code and applications more quickly.

    Project Management Skills to Know

    That said, project management doesn’t happen magically, and it would be foolish to assume that just because someone is a skilled developer they know how to manage a project. But familiarity with a few critical PM skills and requirements can go a long way. Here are five aspects of project management every developer should understand.

    Estimation and Scheduling

    Like any sector of business, project management has its key skills and lingo. The most significant areas of focus for project managers tend to be scheduling and estimation. Scheduling is critical, as you have to assign tasks and accurately manage the workload across the team.

    Estimation is also necessary and important to get right, especially for the product development team. The estimation of a completion date triggers many other teams to perform their functions across the company and is often used by the executive team to target success or failure. But delivery dates are notorious for being missed. Working within date ranges versus single-point deadlines is highly encouraged. Ranged estimates capture and help manage the uncertainty so common in software development today, giving the entire team more opportunity for success and allowing for the unexpected roadblocks that occur with nearly any project.

    Critical Communication

    As a team, it’s essential to keep the lines of communication open. We’re not talking about unnecessary chit chat; we’re referring to critical updates that may affect the overall project. This includes having strong interpersonal skills, namely the ability to maintain clear team communication, complete document reviews and have succinct interactions about project deliverables and expectations.

    Technology and online collaboration skills are also important. Ensure all team members know how to effectively estimate their time and keep their progress updated in software the entire team can access. Ensure document sharing and team updates are enabled, so there are no excuses for missed or mixed messages.

    Problem-Solving

    You can tell a lot about a project team by how the team members solve the major and minor technology and business-related problems that occur—often daily. You might expect that Agile development and DevOps teams have institutionalized troubleshooting in development and engineering. However, teams still need to treat problem-solving as a skill that should be continuously strengthened, especially as technologies evolve. Appointing a lead to coordinate and direct others when problems arise can be an efficient way to take control of a spiraling situation quickly.

    Technical Documentation

    Writing technical documentation can be a neglected task but a valuable skill for project teams. Too often, documentation isn’t part of the team’s workflow, but it should be. Whether a project team has a staff or contract technical writer assigned to its project, documentation is an important skill. It’s also important to note that documentation doesn’t necessarily need to take place in traditional-type documents. Today’s project teams are often better served by wikis, enterprise social tools and online project management tools. What matters is that the documentation is centralized, online, secure, auditable and searchable by the team and by management.

    Risk Management

    Many of the above skills lead to an end-goal of managing risk—in this instance, the risk of not delivering a stable, feature-complete project on time. Risk management is a skill that is most effective when distributed among the project’s team members. This is especially important with teams that consist of cross-functional specialists and those with no clear oversight or direct leader. The key to distributing risk management across a project team is to make individual team members accountable and to explain the potential risks in their project tasks to the greater group. This “ownership” of their function and deliverables allows for the most realistic planning possible, requiring each team member to take accountability for precise timelines for their piece of the project. These timelines then roll up to the greater project plan and provide a more accurate estimation of completion date and potential pitfalls.

    The Well-Rounded Developer

    Project management skills are useful for all employees across an organization. There are no downsides to embracing proven tactics from the project management playbook as they’ll only serve to increase efficiency and promote better team organization and cohesiveness. Developers who have technical skills in collaboration with project management knowledge are always in high demand. Dedicating time to honing these skills is a worthwhile endeavor for any developer.

  • Report Identifies DevOps Skills in Highest Demand

    Report Identifies DevOps Skills in Highest Demand

    When it comes to DevOps there’s general agreement that a skills shortage is holding back broader adoption. The real issue, of course, is identifying what specific DevOps skills are required most.

    With that goal in mind, the DevOps Institute this week published a report that finds the DevOps skills most in demand fall into three broad categories: automation skills (57 percent), process skills (55 percent) and soft skills (53 percent).

    DevOps Institute CEO Jayne Groll said that, given the fact that DevOps is all about automating repeatable processes, the fact that automation skills are the most sought-after is not all that surprising. But when it comes to process skills, the top five areas where organizations need the most help are software development life cycle (47 percent), understanding of process flow and analysis (46 percent), agile development expertise (42 percent), experience with test-driven deployment concepts and methods (40 percent) and system thinking (39 percent).

    The survey also identifies areas where survey respondents need additional functional skills; most notably, IT operations knowledge (52 percent), security (47 percent), IT infrastructure (44 percent), application design and development (42 percent), quality assurance (34 percent) and testing (31 percent).

    While the survey makes it clear what skills are needed most, it’s less clear whether organizations want to train people with the right attitude toward DevOps skills or find individuals with proven skills. About 30 percent of the survey respondents said they look for soft skills first, with an eye toward training or educating new hires on the process and technical skills later. But 32 percent of respondents said they first look for technical skills.

    In that context, however, it’s also worth noting that 43 percent of the C-level executives and IT management executives that participated in the survey identified business skills—defined as communication, influencing, negotiation, strategic thinking and leadership skills—as being the most important attribute of a new hire.

    Other noteworthy attributes of the organizations participating in the DevOps Institute include:

    • Two-thirds (66 percent) have already adopted DevOps to some degree.
    • More than three-quarters (76 percent) employ agile development processes.
    • Nearly half (47 percent) have adopted the ITIL framework as a best practice for IT service management.
    • Only 10 percent rely on site reliability engineering (SRE) practices defined by Google.

    Groll said the survey makes it clear there is still much work to be done in terms of advancing best DevOps practices. One the biggest challenges are all the silos within IT organizations that have their own nomenclature and culture. Each of those silos creates technical and cultural inertia that must be overcome to integrate processes end to end, she said.

    On the plus side, Groll noted the next-generation of IT professionals are being taught best DevOps practices in academic settings, which means the pool of job candidates with familiarity with DevOps practices should increase steadily. The downside is that it might take a while before those individuals learn enough about the business of the company that hires them to effectively employ those DevOps practices.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Upskilling: The Enterprise DevOps Skills Survey and Report

    Upskilling: The Enterprise DevOps Skills Survey and Report

    There has been a lot of recent reference to “T-shaped” IT professionals—individuals whose core competence (the stem) is supplemented by a broad range of other knowledge including soft skills (top of the T). T-shaped talent is in such high demand with a limited supply that recruitment efforts have become very competitive for those with upskilled and cross-skilled transformational know-how.

    Unfortunately, the migration from a deeply skilled specialist to a T-shaped practitioner is leaving many confused about what skills they should be acquiring and hiring and when. That’s why DevOps Institute (DOI) recently launched the 2019 “Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report” community survey to help individuals and enterprises better understand the current and future state of DevOps skilling across the global IT community. Using data science coupled with hiring manager interviews, DOI’s goal in fielding the report is to provide tangible insight into why and where IT practitioners, managers, leaders and business stakeholders should focus their efforts in growing personal and organizational skills portfolios.

    Eveline Oehrlich, a former vice president and research analyst at Forrester, is bringing her data science expertise as the lead analyst for the report. Founding Platinum sponsor Electric Cloud and founding Gold sponsor Cloudbees are also sponsoring this important project. The “Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report” will be a year over year project, and the results will be published in Q1 2019.

    The global survey will remain open until Dec. 7 and can be accessed through the following link: https://www.research.net/r/K9WD2XC

    We encourage everyone in the DevOps community to complete the survey so that the data samples truly reflect the global state of DevOps skills.  Any organization that has at least 20 people complete the survey will get a personal snapshot of the data results. All respondents who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing for four $100 Amazon gift cards.

    — Jayne Groll

  • The Importance of Soft Skills in Engineering

    The Importance of Soft Skills in Engineering

    In college, professors regularly told us that in the real world, we need to be able to work in groups. As a young skeptical undergraduate, I naturally rolled my eyes every time I heard this. Most of us hated group projects. More often than not, people would go missing or not do their part with little to no consequence.

    After nearly five years of reflection on my college learning journey, I realize that while my professors were right about group work being important in the professional world, they were wrong about the way we go about working in groups. Instead of teaching us what is commonly called group work, I’ve found that honing my soft skills has best served me in group project settings.

    Google defines soft skills as, “Personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.”

    Group projects in university teach us about scrum and agile principles—the concept of creating tasks and delegating them with everyone on the hook (to a certain degree) for the delivery of the project. It’s very clean, it’s very simple. It’s almost like a business contract; there is very little human emotion involved. It’s entirely possible to successfully deliver a project while being completely disgruntled at your team and the process.

    I’ve found that being forced to “learn” group work skills often leads to it being devalued as you leave school and step into your first professional role. This is ultimately detrimental over time, as soft skills are vital to successful engineers (especially as they become more senior).

    When I joined LinkedIn right after graduation, I knew it was my role to help build reliable infrastructure. I instinctively had an “us versus them” mentality with developers. Over time (and through several unfortunate experiences), I realized that this doesn’t actually work: I found myself in need of building some non-technical skills.

    Unfortunately, the “real world” is not cut-and-dry business transactions, as I came to learn. Saying “no” to developers and then asking them for things that site reliability engineers (SREs) consider sensible just doesn’t cut it. You have to be able to effectively communicate with others. Over the last five years, I learned a few soft skills can go a long way in working with others.

    Empathy

    One of the greatest traits you can have as an engineer is empathy. There’s a great quote from theologian Ian McLaren, who said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” As invincible as we think we are, at the end of the day, we’re all human and it’s easy to forget that. Co-workers may have family or personal issues that they don’t speak about, or they may struggle to understand a concept. Empathy can help you better communicate with others. Approaching your colleagues with a kind tone rather than a grumpy or aggressive tone goes a long way in building a harmonious work environment.

    During university, I had a team member in a group project who was not able to fulfill his commitments by the required time. My immediate reaction was to let him know I was upset at him. Little did I know that his wife was ill and he was struggling to keep up with his study commitments. My frustration toward him didn’t help the situation and, given the extra context, is actually insensitive. Asking your peers how you can help them is far better than lashing out when things don’t go according to the plan. 

    Clear Communication

    One thing that struck me as an engineer is how many disagreements are based on communication failures. This includes assumptions, misreading intentions or not being specific enough with asks. Many of us work in poor-quality conference calls and text-based conversations. It’s very easy to lose context and intent in digital communication and equally easy to disagree because something wasn’t as clear as it was intended to be.

    Part of my role at LinkedIn is to review all site issues on a daily basis and ensure that we’ve addressed all concerns. When raising these concerns (usually during a phone conference), good intent can be lost quickly. Over time, I learned to ensure that my colleagues understand where my concerns come from and offer support to resolve any outstanding questions.

    Very simply put: Over-communicate. Make sure your tone and intent are very clear to the recipient and be sure to add as much detail to the feedback or request that you’re making.

    Humility

    One important thing I’ve come to learn is that, as SREs, we are expected to have all the answers; after all, our job skills are multi-faceted.

    Over the last four years at LinkedIn, I’ve worked on many different teams, from the traffic stack to the database platform, and amassed a wealth of knowledge on how those systems work—to the point where I could almost be considered an expert for all of those pieces of infrastructure. Naturally, people come to me asking questions about these subjects and unfortunately, I don’t always have all of the answers. It’s very easy to end up in an imposter syndrome position where you feel inadequate because you don’t have the answer to every question.

    This is actually counterintuitive. While great engineers have a solid understanding of the infrastructure, tools and teams around them, the best engineers will learn who the best subject matter experts are and will direct relevant queries to that person.

    This becomes a critical skill as you scale as an engineer. If 30 people are coming to you asking you about things that aren’t in your subject matter expertise, you can get slowed down and may not be able to give the best possible advice, effectively slowing the person asking the question. Knowing when to refer someone and whom to refer them to is part of being a great engineer.

    Mentorship

    The general career growth chart for SREs roughly looks like this:

    • You do toil tasks
    • You work on projects
    • You lead projects and delegate to others
    • You invisage projects and ask people to lead them
    • You create a team or company vision and get groups of people to lead them

    As you become more senior, your role becomes less dependent on day-to-day execution of toil and more focused on empowering those around you. You become less directly in control of the outcome of a project and your success comes from the success of those to whom you’ve delegated. This is where soft skills become important.

    Over the past two and a half years, I’ve been lucky to have a mentor who has helped my personal development. He has been a great role model, especially in teaching me how to lead and influence others. He has often said to me that you need to break through the eight-hour barrier. What he means is that you need to up-level those around you so that your impact on the business goes beyond just your work. Your contributions are also to others to whom you’ve scaled your knowledge and skills. As well as technically leading my team, I have the privilege of being a mentor to others at LinkedIn.

    These four skills are just a small set of a large base of soft skills. Mastering each of these takes time and practice, but ultimately makes you both a better engineer and person.

    — Michael Kehoe

  • Best Practices for Internal Communication in DevOps

    Best Practices for Internal Communication in DevOps

    DevOps has become a widely popular method of collaboration in the IT world. The combination of development, operations and quality assurance, DevOps requires every project have clear communication channels between development teams and individuals. In this article, we’re going to explore some of the best practices for internal communication within the DevOps structure.

    Software development is the game that runs on invention and communication. Therefore, communication methods and channels play a significant role in project success. Better communication between managers, engineers, developers and testers leads to better performance and more satisfying results. Each practice presented can help improve communication within teams and make your work more synchronized and efficient.

    Digital Communication Channels

    Scott W. Ambler notes in his communication diagram, e-mail communication is noted as more effective than any other documentation options, including paper memos, audio tapes and others. E-mail is the best way to share official documents and company memos, making it more suitable for external communication in the DevOps project. But while most individuals today are able to access their e-mail on their smartphones, and e-mail enables users to send large attachments and contact several team members at once, DevOps teams tend to rely on more interactive communication channels.

    Depending on the project needs and the preferences of team members, internal communication can be either through project collaboration apps, an intranet or even the usual communication apps or social media. Since Ambler’s diagram shows that video conversation is by far the most effective form of project communication (aside from face-to-face meetings), most project managers rely on apps with video-calling and videoconferencing functionality.

    Regular Meetings

    Regular meetings are the backbone of the DevOps communication. They can be organized in-person or through videoconferencing apps. Same as with the Agile Project Management structure, the DevOps team should meet at least twice a week. Preferably, the meetings should occur on a daily basis. The Monday or morning meeting can be used for assigning tasks to each team member and the Friday or end-of-day meeting can be used for assessing completed work and for future planning.

    Building Soft Skills

    Unfortunately, HR practices in many industries rely on stereotypes. One of the most prominent stereotypes about IT professionals is their lack of interpersonal skills. Although some engineers and developers fall into this generalization, their knowledge and interests go far beyond IT and technology topics. Still, even the most talkative and assertive members of the development team need to work on their soft skills to improve the team’s communication.

    Improved soft skills enable team members to collaborate more effectively and to develop strong working relationships. The first task of every manager is to find the soft skills already present in your team. This will give the team the chance to find the best opportunities for further development. After the initial skill appraisal, manager can enroll members in courses for assertive communication, negotiation and conflict-solving, depending on their needs and current capabilities.

    Importance of Time Management

    The whole DevOps paradigm strongly relies on effective time management. The implementation of the DevOps model often changes the whole development process and wipes out all the previous scheduling and time-management patterns. A good manager needs to motivate his or her team to change their long-held habits and pace their daily routines so they can keep up with the new organizational patterns.

    We already mentioned how regular meetings are essential for successful DevOps implementation. When organizing the meeting, schedule managers need to leave enough working time so each team member can effectively work on their tasks. Too many interruptions can break up the work process make it difficult for employees to focus. Effective time management relies on both team and individual needs and gives your team the flexibility to work as efficiently as possible.

    Use of Data Insights

    Internal communication on DevOps projects needs to be smart. It needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely, and one of the ways to achieve this is to use accumulated data from current and previous projects. The thorough analysis of accumulated data can give managers more details on:

    • The average number of working hours the team will need to release a new app, make various updates or make patches;
    • How to make the team’s communication more efficient;
    • Identifying the areas where the development strategy is losing its momentum; and
    • Understanding how each task influences the project delivery.

    Constant adaptation and changes in work processes is the base for successful DevOps implementation. This ideal can be achieved only through effective communication between team members. Communication also requires time, so the only way to ensure effective DevOps work is to combine strategic skills, process development, excellent time management and smart data insights.

    About the Author / Nate Vickrey

    Nate Vickrey is a business consultant and an online author. He is mostly engaged in finding the best solutions and latest trends regarding company management and culture. Nate is also the executive editor at one Bizzmark Blog. You can follow Nate’s work on his Twitter page.

  • 5 Team Skills That Make DevOps a Success

    5 Team Skills That Make DevOps a Success

    When starting their DevOps journey, your team will discover it needs to develop some new skills. Most likely the team is good at typing code and solving issues, but what about the soft skills?

    Many teams have to learn how to deal with issues themselves—as self-supporting teams, there is no longer a manager who will help them out and tell them what to do.

    During the Phoenix Project DevOps business simulation, the majority of teams discover collaboration and communication are skills they lack. I am often surprised how few people can really facilitate standups, retrospectives, Andon-sessions and other communication methods.

    Here are the five team skills that participants recognize as core skills they learn (or could learn) during the simulation.

    The Standup

    The standup is a very powerful way to share knowledge about certain issues. The team will stand together for a short time and discuss an issue that blocks the flow, needs clarification or needs to be high priority. So, who should initiate this standup and who should lead it? I’ve noticed a lot of participants find it very difficult to manage this standup initally, but after a few times the team discovers the key elements of a successful standup:

    • Chose a facilitator. Someone who is leading this session. It doesn’t matter who (it doesn’t have to be a manager).
    • Share the focus: What are we going to talk about?
    • Keep it short (time is ticking).
    • Make sure we all understand the outcome.
    • The importance of listening and engagement.

    Facilitating a Retrospective Session

    DevOps is also about continuous learning and experimenting. One of the important steps in this process is retrospective. This activity explores the past round of work and reviews what went OK and what needs to be improved. Again, during the simulations I discovered that not many participants know how to execute this activity. After being shown the right example, the team often can perform this activity themselves. This is what teams learned during the simulation:

    • Someone from the team must facilitate this process.
    • Make sure the improvement is supported and understood by the whole team.
    • Test the improvement before to applying it.
    • Record the discoveries—this becomes part of the visual management system and part of the team backlog of improvement needs.
    • This team skill is one of the skills that more than one team member should be able to execute.

    Managing the KanBan

    During a project, teams sometimes will have standup moments to discuss the work visualized on their KanBan. Work will move from backlog to doing and done, and new priorities will change the order of work. During the simulation participants will take the lead in this process, but some don’t find this easy. After the sessions they discover:

    • Use standups to discuss the changes on the KanBan, make sure the team is fully involved when moving notes around.
    • Challenge participants to share their thoughts. Saying “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes.”
    • Errors are made, but that doesn’t mean somebody has failed and should be punished. Keep the session safe and open.
    • The KanBan is a form of visual management system (VMS). The VMS is not the goal—it is an instrument and must help the team to visualize flow, limit work in progress, drive productivity through an awareness of what people are working on and continuously improve the process.
    • Make sure at the end of the session, all participants know what’s agreed.

    Managing an ‘Andon’ Session

    ‘Andon’ is a very powerful instrument to explore a situation that stopped the flow. As soon as the flow stops, someone “pulls the rope” and the team “swarms around” to investigate the error and try to continue the flow as quickly as possible. This session should be led by a team member; it doesn’t matter who. During this session, the team discovers the following learning:

    • Make sure the session is short and focused on fixing this blockage and restarting the flow.
    • Make sure we are not blaming each other; it should be about exploring what stopped the flow, fixing it and agreeing how to prevent it from happening again.
    • Make sure the whole teams swarms around and participates.
    • Create a safe environment.

    Collaboration

    Doing the work is not always easy. Sometimes we don’t know what to do. Sometimes we need help, and sometimes we are not happy with the actions of a team member. This is what collaboration is all about.

    One of the first aspects of collaboration is helping each other. But, this is not always effective. Sometimes it’s even disruptive or we just take some work from somebody else if we think he is too busy. Here’s what participants learned about collaboration during the simulation:

    • We have to avoid “compensational behavior.” This is about taking other people’s work with the intention to help the other. Sometimes this person doesn’t know you took the work and he or she does it again, creating unnecessary double work.
    • Collaboration is about shared goals and shared processes. We should all know what we are doing and how.
    • It’s also about clear roles and responsibilities. If you know what your colleague is doing, you know what you have to do. And the other way around.
    • You must have an open team culture in which it is also safe to say you don’t know and to ask for help.
    • Collaboration is fun, and it gives energy if we as a team achieves something.

    Conclusion

    I have visited many global DevOps conferences in the previous years and have listened to numerous speakers declaring, “It’s all about people.” And they were right. Unfortunately, the audience often did not get many useful answers.

    A high-performing collaborative team needs team players who know how to deal with the collaboration and communication issues themselves without needing management intervention.

    Teams will have to go through the stages made famous by Bruce Wayne Tuckman (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning) to become an effective, collaborative team.

    Continuous learning is a key success factor and a critical competency for any DevOps team. Why not start this learning journey in a safe and challenging environment?

    A simulation such as the Phoenix Project is a very powerful instrument to teach teams how to collaborate and become high-performing. The environment is safe and feels like the real work environment. Participating in this simulation with an actual team allows you to capture and agree on actions to takeaway. Outcomes can easily be transferred to day-to-day work.

    I wish you a lot of soft skills.

    About the Author / Jan Schilt

    Jan Schilt is owner of GamingWorks. His background is Human Resource Development (MSc). Within GamingWorks he is responsible for Business Simulation design, Facilitation and Train the Trainer. He is also an expert in developing learning activities related to organizational change. He builds all the simulations and has delivered more than 300 workshops worldwide.

     

     

     

  • What DevOps Skills are Organizations Looking for?

    What DevOps Skills are Organizations Looking for?

    DevOps is a cultural, philosophical and organic approach toward automating workflow and getting products to market more efficiently and effectively.

    DevOps engineers are in top demand right now. According to studies by Gartner, 25 percent of top global 2000 organizations will have adopted DevOps as a mainstream strategy by the end of 2016.

    DevOps is both a cultural movement and a philosophy … which can make it difficult to define the specific skill set you need a DevOps team to possess in order to function successfully.

    Of course, an excellent way to show fluency in DevOps is by earning a DevOps Institute certificate—for example, DevOps Foundation®.

    That being said, there are some “mission-critical” DevOps skills that organizations are searching for pretty universally right now.

    1. Experience with infrastructure automation tools and fluency in web languages

    Experience with tools such as Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, Docker, Chef and Windows PowerShell DSC as well as fluency in languages including Ruby, Python, Java and PHP are must-have skills for DevOps pros.

    Organizations are searching for DevOps candidates who are highly proficient in many of these tools and languages and open to increasing their competencies further when given the opportunity to do so.

    2. Expertise in “soft skills”

    DevOps evolved as a way to enhance collaboration across project life cycles and connect front-end and back-end professionals on either side of the software development and operations spectrum.

    When software developers and operations staff (system engineers, systems admins, DBAs, etc.) collaborate effectively, communicate honestly and work as a cohesive team, the software development life cycle (SDLC) is streamlined, risk factors are mitigated, and projects are completed and deployed with a minimum of bugs, quality defects and glitches.

    In addition, it can be useful for organizations to have DevOps specialists on their team who are comfortable in the role of client consultant, able to interact effectively and build positive business relationships with customers while addressing their needs and wants.

    Organizations look for DevOps candidates who are skilled in interpersonal communication, with an arsenal of listening, negotiation, problem-solving and team-building skills at the ready.

    3. Familiarity with CI (continuous integration) tools

    Continuous integration is a DevOps methodology that continually merges source code updates from all developers on a specific software build, notifying the team of any failures in the process.

    This offers a real-time window into the developing software system, allowing immediate and constant engagement of all team members throughout the project lifecycle.

    CI tools DevOps candidates should be familiar with include CruiseControl, CruiseControl.NET, Jenkins, Bamboo, Hudson, ThoughtWorks’ Go, Urbancode’s Anthill Pro, Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and Jetbrains’ Team City.

    4. Bonus Skills

    Other skills hiring managers are on the lookout for in the DevOps space include:

    • Extensive knowledge of software build cycles
    • Experience deploying code
    • Experience in software architecture
    • Familiarity with application programming
    • Database management
    • System design

    Useful experience and certifications include:

    • Project Management
    • Risk Management
    • Scrum Master

    The good news is that the industry’s need for DevOps team members with diverse and evolving skill sets is in sync with what DevOps candidates want from their workplace. According to the 2014 State of DevOps Report from Puppet Labs, an atmosphere conducive to learning is a primary component of job satisfaction among DevOps engineers.

    About the Author / Robin Borough

    Robin BoroughRobin Borough is President of Omnikron Systems, Inc., which offers IT and management training and IT staffing services. As an advisor to technology professionals and executives for over 25 years, Robin has built a world-class reputation as a “go to” career strategist in the IT industry, one who’s capable of successfully guiding executives and specialists, at any level, through transition.