DASA: defining roles, creating qualifications and inspiring IT professionals

Hiring resources with the necessary skills for DevOps is becoming a pressing need. DASA believes that by defining roles and creating a universal qualification program for DevOps and Agile skills development, it will help organizations identify the competencies needed for the new roles created by the DevOps movement. And by doing so, training and qualification programs can help those involved to acquire the skills required to succeed in DevOps. More importantly, by bringing thought leadership into this area, the DevOps Agile Skills Association aims to inspire IT professionals to serve as change champions by sharing and practicing what they have learned.

The DevOps competence model

DASA’s competence model reflects the vision that the role of the IT engineer will become more generic as DevOps teams develop. Any member of the team can roughly do the job of another. The key to working in this environment is to recognize that there is a set of skills and knowledge that needs to be present in every DevOps team. The distribution of these skills and knowledge may be different per team. However, each team will need to ensure that there is enough of knowledge and sufficient skills in each area to ensure the service is delivered as required by the customers concerned.

DevOps skills and behavior areas

DASA’s competence model identifies 8 knowledge areas and 4 skills and behavior areas that are relevant to DevOps. Every professional operating in a DevOps team requires all 12 competencies to a varying degree. This is described in the DASA professional qualification program.

DevOps skill areas

1. Courage: evangelism, coaching, self-confidence, proactivity, reflection, trust, open discussions, experimentation, fail fast, courage to change.
2. Teambuilding: understand the other’s point of view, collaboration, mutual accountability, common purpose, ability to integrally support the service/product.
3. DevOps leadership: facilitate teams to high performance, humility, transparency, service-lifecycle mindset, stakeholder management.
4. Continuous improvement: we do our work better today than yesterday, kaizen mindset, quality at the source, first time right, knowledge sharing, ability to adapt.

DevOps knowledge areas

1. Business value optimization: use of the IT service in real life, including direct feedback loop of user comments to team, service level management, definition of done, business activity/performance monitoring, business case management.
2. Business analysis: functional requirements, non-functional requirements, longer term development of business process (based on translation of market developments), data analysis and refinement.
3. Architecture & Design: ensure a fit between developments and current situation, overall service design, patterns and styles.
4. Programming: software engineering mastery, everything as code, data management.
5. Continuous delivery: automated testing, deployment and release management, configuration management, version control, cloud, containerization, feature-driven delivery.
6. Test specification: design of test cases, test concepts.
7. Infrastructure engineering: technical monitoring, performance management (e.g load balancing, etc.), capacity and availability management, reliability engineering, cloud, containerization.
8. Security, Risk & Compliance: security, service-continuity planning.