“THE NEED FOR NEW SKILLS” DASA DEVOPS COMPETENCE FRAMEWORK

Rik Farenhorst (Xebia)

Niels Loader (Quint Wellington Redwood)

Since the publication of our previous

white paper” Embracing Digital

Disruption by Adopting DevOps

Practices”in April 2016, we have seen

that DevOps is increasingly moving into

the mainstream of IT organizations.

The innovators and early adopters

have made their mark. We all know the

stories of Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and

Google as trailblazers in the world of

DevOps. Many larger corporations have

also taken major steps to working in a

DevOps way, and the first valuable case

studies and lessons learned are shared

at conferences that are very well

attended. But the vast majority of IT

organizations in the world, is just about

to embark on this transformational

journey.

These organizations know the highlights of the DevOps practices,

understand the potential, and are looking for guidance in avoiding the

key pitfalls. They are also looking to provide some form of clarity for their

organizations in terms of what DevOps can and will mean. One of the key

questions is: what does DevOps mean for my IT organization, my IT people

and their skills and knowledge?

This is exactly why the DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA) was formed.

Even with extensive automation, running and improving IT services is still

a people business. It is the creativity and capabilities of skilled technical

people that allows profit and not-for-profit organizations to provide

amazing services to their customers and stakeholders.

“THE NEED FOR NEW SKILLS”

It is useful to put the current movement in the market into context. Looking

at the automobile industry, we see that the IT industry is following a

similar path, only much faster. Before the 1920’s, the car industry was

very much driven by an artisan approach. Each product was different (as

a result of the steep learning curve) and they were created by craftsmen

in their sheds. From the 1920’s onwards, we see that the successful car

companies turned to Mass Production in which the key characteristics were

specialization and coordination of these specialisms. In the car industry,

Toyota pioneered a new way of working that since the 1990’s was adopted

by most of the car manufacturers: Lean production based on multi-skilled

people working in teams to produce entire products.

The IT industry is following the same development path. Artisan until the

development of the PC in the 1980’s, with the move from Mass Production

to Lean Production starting around 2010. DevOps is the IT form of Lean

Production. The global move towards DevOps as a post-Mass Production

service delivery and improvement model is the driver behind the change in

requirements of IT people.

We firmly believe, and we see this reflected in the market, that the role of

the IT engineer will become more generic as DevOps teams develop and IT

people become more multi-skilled. The key to working in this environment

is to recognize that there is a skills and knowledge set that needs to

be present in every DevOps team. The distribution of these skills and

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knowledge may be different per team. However, each team will need to

ensure that there is enough of each skill and knowledge area to ensure the

service is delivered as required by the customers of the service.

The reason for this movement is the need for flexibility and the

understanding that nobody can deliver an IT service on their own for a

long (or even short) period of time; IT services have become too complex.

Paradoxically, this does mean that IT engineers need to have a broader

scope of knowledge and skills so that they are able to deliver the service as

a team.

Over the past couple of years, we have seen DevOps teams emerging

in various phases of development. Our experience has shown, and in

discussion with other DevOps practitioners confirmed, that there are

specific skills and knowledge that can be discerned. Figure 1 depicts

the 12 DevOps competence areas that DASA recognizes, divided into 8

knowledge areas and 4 skill areas. A basic level of competence on all

12 areas is required for IT professionals in this modern era, to be able

to effectively add value to a DevOps team. For the whole team to be

effective, expert-level knowledge and skills are required on these areas as

well, but here we envision three main areas of expertise for IT professionals

to specialize into: Specify & Verify, Create & Deliver and Enable & Scale.

Reality has shown that the people necessary to carry out these three areas

are different types of personalities.

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DASA’S AGILE DEVOPS COMPETENCE FRAMEWORK

Teambuilding

Skill Areas

DevOps

Leadership

Architecture

and Design

Business

value

Optimization

Continuou

Improvem

Infrast

Engine

Knowledge

Areas

Business

Analysis

Test

Specification

Programming

Continuous

Delivery

Security, Ris

Compliance

Figure 1: the 12 key DevOps Competence Areas

The DASA Competence Framework identifies 8 knowledge areas and 4

skills that are relevant in DevOps.

Every individual operating in a DevOps team is require to be competent at

all 8 knowledge areas and proficient at the 4 skill levels.

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Courage

In order for DevOps teams to be effective, they require all 12 areas to be at

the expert level. Individual team members can specialize in specific areas,

in order for teams to achieve these capabilities.

SPECIFY AND VERIFY

Within this specialization area, we find the following specific competencies:

Business Value Optimization, Business Analysis, Architecture & Design

and Test Specification. We see that these areas are very much focused on

ensuring that the requirements of the customers are fully understood and

translated into the team so that these requirements can be integrated into

the IT service. We estimate that approximately one third of the team will be

involved in these areas of expertise.

– Within IT organizations, we find that there is a substantial amount of

knowledge of business processes and business rules. This is principally

a result of IT people who have built these processes and rules into

information systems. Business Value Optimization is the knowledge

area in which IT harnesses its knowledge of the business and helps to

identify the improvements that add most value to the business parties

it serves. The people focusing on this knowledge area will have intimate

knowledge of the business processes their IT services support and

will be able to have well-founded discussions with business process

leaders concerning the development of the process.

– Having identified potential improvements, it is necessary for the

DevOps team to have the ability to carry out a detailed analysis of

business such that the solution implemented is effective in terms of

functionality, cost and lead time. The Business Analysis knowledge

area means that the DevOps team can deliver its own estimation of

the impact of the improvement on both the business process and the

IT systems supporting it.

– The DevOps team also needs to translate the impact of improvements

to services on the technology necessary to deliver the IT service.

The Architecture & Design knowledge area covers this need. This

knowledge area is vital for all DevOps teams since each team must be

able to identify the impact of changes to both its own technology stack

and the technology stacks of IT services with which there are links.

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– Last but certainly not least, the Specify & Verify profile includes Test

Specification. This is all about ensuring upfront that it is clear how the

DevOps team and its customers will know whether new functionality

actual meets the needs of the users of the IT service. Increasingly,

methods such as Test Driven Development stress the need to specify

the tests first so that code can be created in line with the required

outcomes. Test specification brings together the other 3 knowledge

areas so that the team can create automated testing for each change

to the IT service.

The key responsibility is ultimately ensuring that the design of the service is

‘future-proof’, both technologically and functionally. And that the ability to

test any new functionality is optimally facilitated by test specification that

takes both the customer usage of the system and need for speed into

account.

CREATE AND DELIVER

The majority of a DevOps team will fall into the specialization area of

Create & Deliver. The core knowledge areas are Programming, Continuous

Delivery, Security, Risk & Compliance and Infrastructure Engineering. This is

really the heart of the team’s capabilities.

– Programming is the core competency of the DevOps team,

independent of whether it is a DevOps team supporting an Application,

a Platform or a Full Stack. IT technicians will all need to become

competent at creating and modifying software code. This represents

a substantial change for people who originally come from Operations

(particularly Infrastructure Operations), where until now there has

been little need to actually work with code on a daily basis. Many

organizations that started their DevOps transformation struggle with

the lack of software engineering skills in their newly formed teams,

and we predict this is one of the main reasons my many traditional

companies will not survive the digital disruption.

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– A vital knowledge area for DevOps teams is Continuous Delivery.

This concerns the technology to facilitate the automated delivery of

new code through a well-constructed “pipeline” from development

to production, but maybe more importantly, also the conceptual

understanding of the process for which the technology is being used.

Continuous Delivery requires intimate knowledge of the IT delivery

process from development to production.

– The other technological area that a DevOps team must master

is Infrastructure Engineering. This concerns the automation of

technological environments, so that these can be standardized, kept

consistent and refreshed easily. These skills are particularly important

for DevOps teams providing infrastructure services. However, it is

important for Application-oriented DevOps teams to have a good

understanding of the underlying infrastructural technology (being

on-premise or based on cloud-native services) so that they can ensure

that their applications match the standard infrastructure models in an

optimal way.

– We also see the need for attention to Security, Risk & Compliance. This

is about building in quality at the source. Attention to secure coding,

understanding the risks related to not just the technology but also the

functionality being created and ensuring that business rules being

coded comply with industry regulations is essential to ensure that the

applications deployed have value for the customer.

We understand that our choices for both the naming of knowledge areas

and how they have been distributed over the two roles can and will lead to

discussion.

Two of the discussion areas are Security, Risk & Compliance and the

balance of Programming versus Infrastructure Engineering. Doubtlessly,

you can define others.

– We have placed Security, Risk & Compliance with the Create & Deliver

role because this is where the coding actually takes place. However,

Specify & Verify plays an important role in actually defining the security

aspects, the risks to be mitigated and the regulations with which to be

complied.

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– The exact balance of skills particularly programming versus

infrastructure engineering will of course depend on the total area

of responsibility of the team. We see DevOps being used to deliver

infrastructure services, and obviously those delivering application

services. More rarely, we see full-stack DevOps teams responsible for

everything from user interface to server hardware. The technology stack

will ultimately determine the balance of knowledge needed in the team.

One apparent omission is Monitoring. We recognize that monitoring is a

vital aspect of delivering a successful service. Increasingly, monitoring

appears to be its own area of expertise. We have chosen to incorporate

monitoring as part of all of the knowledge areas within Create & Deliver,

rather than specify it as a separate knowledge area. Each knowledge area

is responsible for ensuring that it is clear what is going on in each of the

areas.

The most important point is that a DevOps team must have all eight

knowledge areas present in order to be able to operate - relatively -

autonomously. Each DevOps team must evaluate the knowledge areas to

determine how much of each is necessary for an optimal operation. This is

partially a design activity based on the expected demand for services, the

amount of regulation and the complexity of the business process(es)

being supported; partially this will be an experiential development within

the team.

Starting with a set of individuals, the team will need to develop together to

ensure that all knowledge areas are addressed in a way that allows the

team to be independent.

ENABLE AND SCALE

The third specialization area in the DASA Competence Framework is

Enable & Scale. This area covers the ability to ensure that a DevOps teams

works optimally and that multiple DevOps teams that support and develop

the same product can be governed in such a way that their common

product continues to provide value for customers.

The key aspects of the competence framework that are vital for this

role are found in the skills areas. DASA recognizes four major skill

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areas: Courage, Team-building, DevOps Leadership and Continuous

Improvement.

– Courage is about the ability to act, to take a step and try something.

And at the same time understand the risks and minimize them. Much

of DevOps is uncharted territory and, for the coming years, will be the

domain of early adopters (the innovators are already there). There will

come a time when the DevOps way of working will be the norm, but still

IT engineers will need to have the courage to take the next step.

– For most of the lives of many IT engineers, they have worked in

environments where they have not really needed to build teams,

except when they have worked in project teams. Their colleagues

have been kindred souls. In the new world of IT, the successful IT

people will be those who can truly find a way to work in a team with

a large diversity of backgrounds and points of view. Team-Building is

a critical skill to ensure that the various IT engineers with their diverse

backgrounds work together in an effective way

– This also means that IT leadership will need to adjust the way

they steer the organization. DevOps Leadership is made up of a

combination of both formal and informal leadership. These need to

be balanced and used to encourage collaboration, and to ensure

that teams do not stagnate and lose sight of their ultimate goal to

continuously ensure that the service meets the requirement of the

business process.

– One of the key ways to counter this stagnation is to ensure that teams

create the Continuous Improvement habit. This means developing

both the mindset to focus on seeing and solving problems, coupled

with having the skill to solve problems in a structured way.

Each of these skills is needed to enable the members of the DevOps team

to work effectively together. They are also required to ensure that DevOps

teams can co-operate and co-exist effectively.

As a consequence, it is not acceptable to solely allocate the skills to the

Enable & Scale role and then allocate the role to a single person. In fact, all

members of a DevOps team must become competent to a certain level in

the four skill areas; this is acquired at the Practitioner level.

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BRINGING THE COMPETENCIES TOGETHER

The challenge for both the IT organization and the DevOps team is

to ensure that the team has the right amount of each of these 12

competencies. And as the lifecycle of the IT service develops the balance

of the required competencies is likely to shift. The goal is always to achieve

a balance between Knowledge, Skills, and Behavior, of which the latter

directly follows from having acquired the proper knowledge and skills that

stimulate empowerment, mastery and purpose (see Figure 2).

The interesting challenge for many IT organizations is: how do I go from

my current population of specialists to a population of engineers with one

of the two broad areas of expertise, supported by the skills. The answer of

course lies in stimulating IT engineers to develop towards the inevitable

new paradigm of IT. Will this be easy? No, but it will be the most exciting

journey of personal and team growth that most IT people will ever have

experienced. The good thing, though, is that organizations that have

dared taking this step, report significant gains in productivity, quality,

business success, and employee happiness, as highlighted in the 2016

State of DevOps survey by Puppet Labs. [https://puppet.com/resources/

whitepaper/2016-state-of-devops-report]

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DASA FOCUSES ON THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS REQUIRED FOR DEVOPS PROFESSIONALS, TEAM AND ORGANIZATIONS TO BE SUCCESSFUL

Business Value Optimization

Business Analysis

Architecture & Design

Programming

Continuous Delivery

Test Specification

Infrastructure Engineering

Security, Risk & Compliance

Behavior

Knowledge

Skills

Courage

Teambuilding

DevOps Leadership

Continuous improvement

Figure 2: Plotting the 12 Competence a Areas Knowledge, Behavior, and Skills

HOW DO THE DASA PROFILES WORK?

Let’s say you are a systems engineer. You have a solid technical grounding

supplemented with a healthy dose of ambition. Your ambition tells you

that your future in IT hinges on your ability to work and flourish in a

DevOps environment in which infrastructure IT services are developed and

provided.

The aim of DASA is to provide you with a standardized competence

framework on which you can plot your own current capabilities. We have

developed a series of standard profiles against which you can match

yourself. The chances are that your current profile will not match the profile

necessary for working in a DevOps environment. The DASA profile will

indicate where you need to strengthen your skills and knowledge.

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DASA also caters for the other side of the employment equation. An

IT organization wishing to recruit technicians to work in a DevOps

environment can use the standard profiles or a custom version of the

profile to indicate what the organization needs in terms of skills and

knowledge. A custom version of the profile would show a different level of

knowledge required, as compared to the standard profile.

Demand and supply of DevOps engineers will be facilitated through this

standardized profile, helping both IT engineers and IT organizations to

clearly define what they have on offer.

Measure your own capabilities and determine the gap between your

current capabilities and the skills and knowledge required for the role you

desire. You may find there are gaps you need to work on.

For each of the competence areas, DASA has created a high level

description of what each of the areas looks like using a 5-level

development model. The aim is for people working in or with DevOps

teams to identify their level of competency and gain an understanding

of how this develops as the team moves to a high-performance DevOps

team. In a next white paper, we will discuss the details of this development

model in more detail.

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CONTACT

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Melbourne, 3000 VIC

Australia

www.metapm.com.au

enquiries@metapm.com.au

+1 (302) 476-2732

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