Seven Simple Challenges To Boost Your DevOps Appreciation

At some point in your career you’ll hear about DevOps. But what is it? What does it mean and how does it help? What part do we testing professionals play with DevOps? Here are seven simple challenges to boost your DevOps appreciation.?

1. Without doing any research, write down your definition of DevOps. Then spend a week or so digging into various definitions from multiple sources. Rewrite your own definition. What’s changed? What misconceptions did you previously have that you now notice??

2. Find out how your team are alerted of production problems. How do they respond? How do they communicate internally and with customers when there’s a problem with production? What do other companies do that might inspire an approach?

3. Summarise important outages that have happened at your workplace. What did the team learn from those experiences? What steps, tooling or processes were put in place to reduce the risk of these outages being repeated?

4. Find and follow six people on social media who write about their work in the DevOps space. What do they typically talk about? What are common themes? What patterns can you spot? How do they help you and others?

5. Research multiple ways to manage source code control. What seems to be the more aligned with a DevOps way of working? With respect to your team's current context, how might it help your team?

6. Share a story about exposure control. It could be from your own experience or from someone else. For example, what happened recently when using a feature flag? What exposure control method are you unfamiliar with that you’d like to learn about?

7. Spend an hour researching three ops-focused tools and write down the pros and cons of each. Where might they work well and in what context? Can you try one at work?

Want more? Check out 30 Days of DevOps with Lisa Crispin and Noah Sussman .

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A 30-Day challenge is a great way to learn independently or as a team. It’s also a great way to reconnect with and inspire folks in the testing community and beyond. It makes a real difference when you share your outcomes with others. And all challenges are available to run at any time. Have a look at the entire 30 Days catalogue on the Ministry of Testing platform.

Want to join 345 testing professionals at TestBash UK? This is an exceptional opportunity to learn and connect with fellow testers in person. Grab a ticket. ???

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