DevOps Institute Steps Up as Continuous Learning Sponsor

DevOps Institute, the global member-based association focused on advancing the human elements of DevOps, announced in July 2019 that it would serve as the Continuous Learning Track Sponsor of DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019, held August 12–15 in San Francisco. The sponsorship brought a concrete upskilling program to conference attendees, including two professional certification courses and a panel discussion on the future of the IT workforce.

The announcement underlined a growing emphasis in the DevOps community on the human side of transformation—skills, culture, and continuous learning—alongside the tooling and automation conversations that typically dominate DevOps conferences.

“Our main goal is to help the humans of DevOps evolve skills, gain knowledge, and explore ideas within a vibrant, continuous learning community.”

— Jayne Groll, CEO, DevOps Institute

Certification Courses Offered at the Event

DevOps Institute offered two certification courses across the opening two days of the conference (August 12–13). Attendees who completed either full course received an exam voucher to schedule their certification exam online.

DevOps Leader Certification Course

Facilitator: Helen Beal, DevOpsologist at Ranger4 Limited

The DevOps Leader course is designed to surface real-world best practices in transformational leadership for DevOps initiatives. It covers the cultural shifts required in fast-moving DevOps and Agile environments and targets managers, directors, executives, and anyone who influences culture and working practices within an organisation. The course prepares learners to sit the DevOps Leader examination.

DevSecOps Engineering Certification Course

Facilitator: Sean Davis, Chief Transformation Evangelist at Equifax

The DevSecOps Engineering course teaches practical techniques for integrating security practices directly into DevOps workflows—embodying the principle that security is everyone’s responsibility. The course explains how IT professionals at all levels can apply data and security science to protect their organisation and customers. Target participants include software engineers, operations professionals, and security practitioners. The course prepares learners for the DevSecOps Engineering examination.

Panel Discussion: Upskilling DevOps

In addition to the certification courses, DevOps Institute hosted a panel discussion focused on the challenges and opportunities shaping the future IT workforce. Sam Fell of CloudBees moderated the session, which featured the following panellists:

• Helen Beal – DevOpsologist, Ranger4 Limited
• Sean Davis – Chief Transformation Evangelist, Equifax
• Damon Edwards – Industry expert and DevOps practitioner
• Jayne Groll – CEO, DevOps Institute

The panel explored how organisations can systematically upskill their DevOps practitioners and what skills, knowledge, and mindsets IT professionals will need to remain effective as the discipline continues to evolve.

Why Continuous Learning Matters at DevOps Conferences

DevOps World | Jenkins World has historically attracted DevOps thought leaders, IT executives, continuous delivery practitioners, and the Jenkins open-source community. By embedding a dedicated Continuous Learning Track—sponsored and programmed by DevOps Institute—the 2019 event gave attendees a structured path to formal certification alongside the broader conference content.

“Quality training such as this educates and equips DevOps practitioners to be leaders in their organisation’s DevOps transformation, providing them the skills and best practices necessary to achieve success.”

— Anthony Palladino, SVP Worldwide Field Operations, CloudBees

This model—pairing a major practitioner conference with vendor-neutral certification tracks—reflects a broader industry trend of treating skills development as a first-class conference deliverable rather than an afterthought.

About DevOps Institute

DevOps Institute is a global member-based association dedicated to advancing the human elements of DevOps. Its work is structured around a SKIL Framework—covering Skills, Knowledge, Ideas, and Learning—and encompasses accreditations, research, events, and continuous learning programmes. The organisation’s stated mission is to provide practitioners with the “human know-how” needed to modernise IT and make DevOps transformations succeed.

For more information, visit the DevOps Institute website.

1. Make Everyone Accountable to Shared Goals

Steve Burton, CD and DevOps Evangelist, Harness

Assigning people a “DevOps Engineer” title does not automatically shorten release cycles. Real progress comes from making every team member aware of the business objectives that their work supports and giving them genuine accountability for shared outcomes.

• Developers should be responsible for how their code behaves in production — not just in a test environment.
• Operations engineers should be freed from manually overseeing every release so they can focus on higher-value work.
• Compensation and incentives for both groups should be aligned to business outcomes, not individual task completion.

As Burton puts it, hiring a hundred people with “DevOps Engineer” in their title without shared goals and accountability is like putting a hundred tires on a car and expecting it to go faster. The structure must change, not just the org chart.

2. Cut the Jargon

Fin Goulding, International CIO, Aviva

Technical language creates invisible walls between IT teams and the business stakeholders whose support you need to scale DevOps. Goulding recommends leading conversations with business outcomes rather than acronyms. When pitching DevOps expansion to senior leadership or seeking additional investment, explain what will be delivered faster and more reliably — not the mechanics of CI/CD pipelines.

Goulding prefers the term Flow Teams over labels like “DevOps 2.0,” arguing that holistic, cross-functional teams focused on flow are the model that will define the most successful workplaces going forward. Whatever terminology you choose, prioritize clarity over technical precision when speaking to a mixed audience.

3. Measure Wisely and Choose the Middle Path

Mirco Hering, APAC DevOps and Agile Lead, Accenture

Before you can demonstrate progress, you need to define what success looks like and how it will be measured. Hering warns against two common traps: chasing the promises of over-eager vendors, and losing sight of practical, incremental improvement.

His “middle path” guidance:

• Do not look so far into the future that short-term wins become invisible.
• Do not be so short-sighted that you fail to build toward a longer transformation.
• Challenge the status quo, but do not demand ideological purity at the expense of pragmatic progress.
• Use technology to support your transformation, but do not place all your trust in any single tool or platform.

4. Move from a Project to a Product Mindset

Carmen DeArdo, DevOps Leader, Nationwide

The goal of a mature DevOps practice is to reduce lead time and deliver software more frequently so the business can respond quickly to change. That goal cannot be achieved when IT operates as a cost center that executes discrete projects on behalf of the business.

DeArdo advocates for a product-centric model in which IT is a full partner — not a vendor — working alongside the business to accelerate the flow of value across end-to-end product streams. This shift changes how teams are funded, how they are organized, and how their success is measured. Projects have end dates; products have ongoing owners who are continuously responsible for outcomes.

5. Balance Soft and Technical Skills on DevOps Teams

Robert Reeves, CTO, Datical

DevOps leaders need to build teams that combine human and technical capabilities. Neither alone is sufficient.

Soft Skills

• Communication: DevOps engineers accumulate knowledge that must be documented and shared effectively. Internal wikis, issue trackers, and informal knowledge-sharing sessions help ensure insights are not siloed with individuals.
• Collaboration: Effective collaboration in a DevOps context often involves tooling — for example, using chat platforms to surface alerts and outages, and running structured retrospectives to uncover process failures.
• Customer-first mindset: Even in a non-customer-facing role, DevOps engineers serve internal customers: developers, QA, project management, and business leadership. Empathy, transparency, and the ability to prioritize competing requests are essential.

Technical Skills

• System administration and engineering: A working knowledge of Linux and Windows server administration, networking fundamentals, and common infrastructure layers is foundational for DevOps engineers who need to diagnose and resolve production issues.
• Scripting and automation: Languages such as Python, Ruby, Bash, and Shell enable engineers to automate repetitive tasks, reduce human error, and free up time for higher-value work.
• Configuration management: Tools in this category allow teams to manage many servers and environments consistently — handling kernel updates, network settings, SSH key management, and tool provisioning across data centers and cloud providers.
• Identity and access governance: Controlling who can access which systems and data is both a security requirement and a productivity enabler. Familiarity with SSH keys, LDAP, and remote desktop protocols is part of a well-rounded DevOps skill set.

6. Don’t Let Alignment Goals Delay DevOps Progress

Ben Grinnell, Managing Director, North Highland

Waiting for full senior-leadership alignment before starting your DevOps implementation is a common and costly mistake. Full consensus at the executive level rarely arrives before it is too late to matter.

Grinnell recommends starting on the ground and building alignment in parallel by over-communicating early wins. The examples you share with leadership should be:

1. Easy for senior leaders to understand without a technical background.
2. Significant enough to register as meaningful progress.
3. Relevant enough that leaders can visualize the same pattern applied to a much larger part of the business.

Define a clear direction — a North Star — but avoid getting locked in prolonged debates about a precise destination and timeline. Getting the organization moving with shared direction is more valuable than a perfect plan that never launches.

7. Tap Into the Energy of the Organization

Jonathan Smart, Head of Ways of Working, Barclays

Smart introduces the concept of Aiki — using the organization’s existing energy and momentum to drive the transformation rather than fighting against inertia. In practice, this means:

• Identifying and starting with natural champions — people who are already enthusiastic about better ways of working.
• Rewriting internal standards and processes to embed DevOps principles rather than treating them as exceptions.
• Treating internal audits as allies rather than obstacles, since a well-structured audit process can reinforce accountability and continuous improvement.

8. Beware of Isolated Innovation Teams

Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud

Creating a dedicated “innovation team” to pilot DevOps practices can backfire. Isolated groups often become disconnected from the rest of the organization and produce limited transferable value. Wallgren argues that the people most willing and able to adapt to change are the ones who create transformation others can follow — and they are spread across the organization, not concentrated in a single team.

His recommendations for DevOps leaders:

1. Design your organization so that product, development, and IT operations teams share ownership of the software delivery pipeline and treat it as a product.
2. Create an environment where teams can easily collect data on delivery performance metrics and KPIs, capture workflow bottlenecks, and focus on the value and quality of what they ship.
3. Continuously require teams to scrutinize their value streams and set short-term goals to address the biggest bottlenecks first.
4. Build a culture across the entire organization anchored in one mindset: continuously disrupting your own processes before a competitor does it for you.

9. Remember That “Continuous” Is the Keyword

Eran Kinsbruner, Director and Lead Software Evangelist, Perfecto

DevOps, at its core, means having a fully automated workflow for delivering software — and that cannot happen without mature automation. Kinsbruner emphasizes the importance of the three Cs working in harmony:

• Continuous Integration (CI): Developers integrate code changes frequently, with each change verified by an automated build and test sequence.
• Continuous Testing (CT): Automated testing is not a gate at the end of a pipeline but a layer woven throughout it, validating quality at every stage.
• Continuous Delivery (CD): Every code change that passes CI and CT is in a deployable state and can be released to production reliably and repeatedly.

The key to success is a mature Continuous Testing practice that acts as the connective tissue between CI and CD — running automatically for every code change, every day. Without it, the pipeline stalls and the promise of fast, reliable delivery goes unmet.

Putting It All Together

These nine tips share a common thread: lasting DevOps transformation is a leadership and cultural challenge as much as a technical one. Shared accountability, clear communication, measured progress, product thinking, balanced skills, pragmatic momentum, organizational energy, inclusive change, and relentless automation all reinforce each other. Strong DevOps leaders address all of these dimensions simultaneously rather than treating any single one as the silver bullet.

Original insights sourced from the Enterprisers Project.

Speed Without Quality Is a Race to the Bottom

One of the most common mistakes organizations make when adopting DevOps is treating it purely as a velocity play. They invest in CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and automation—and then discover that shipping faster simply means shipping broken software faster. A Forrester study commissioned by Tricentis examined 94 quality metrics across four categories and found that for automation to deliver real value in a DevOps context, teams must track quality throughout every stage of development and deployment.

Clark Golestani, managing director of C Sensei Group, put it plainly: “Organizations adopt DevOps to accelerate the delivery of innovative software that creates positive user experiences. If you start accelerating delivery without also rethinking your approach to quality, you will end up rapidly delivering updates that drive your customers to competitors.”

The research also highlighted a distinction in how DevOps leaders approach measurement. Some focus on contextual metrics—which tie quality signals to business outcomes—while others rely on counting metrics, such as defect counts or test pass rates. Similarly, some teams measure user experience across an end-to-end journey, while others focus on application-specific interactions. Understanding which approach fits your organization’s maturity and risk profile is itself a leadership skill.

5 Practices That Define Effective DevOps Leaders

Whether you are establishing yourself as a DevOps leader or looking to sharpen your existing practice, these five disciplines are central to delivering quality at the pace DevOps demands.

1. Allocate Proper Testing Budgets and Continuously Upgrade Testing Skills

Testing is frequently underfunded relative to development, and that imbalance compounds as release frequency increases. DevOps leaders treat test engineering as a first-class investment—both in tooling and in people. This means budgeting for test infrastructure, allocating time for engineers to learn modern testing frameworks, and recognizing that test automation is skilled engineering work, not a checkbox activity.

2. Implement Continuous Testing to Support Continuous Delivery

Continuous testing means integrating automated tests at every stage of the pipeline—not just at the end before a release gate. When tests run continuously alongside development, teams get immediate feedback on regressions, integration failures, and performance degradation. This is what allows continuous delivery to be a reality rather than a goal. Without continuous testing, a CD pipeline is simply a fast path to production incidents.

3. Embed Testers Within Integrated Delivery Teams

The traditional model of a separate QA team that receives a build at the end of a sprint is incompatible with DevOps cadences. Effective DevOps leaders embed testers—or engineers with strong testing skills—directly into cross-functional delivery teams. When testers participate in sprint planning, story grooming, and design discussions, quality considerations surface early, before they become expensive defects.

4. Automate End-to-End Functional Testing

Unit and integration tests catch many problems, but they do not validate that a complete user journey works as intended. End-to-end functional tests simulate real user interactions across multiple services and interfaces, exposing issues that lower-level tests miss. Automating these tests—and running them as part of the pipeline—ensures that deployment velocity does not come at the cost of user-facing reliability.

5. Shift Testing Left in the Development Lifecycle

“Shift left” means moving testing activities earlier in the development process—ideally beginning at the requirements and design phase. When teams write testable requirements, define acceptance criteria before coding begins, and run tests in development environments rather than waiting for staging, defects are found when they are cheapest to fix. Shift-left testing also changes the culture: quality becomes everyone’s responsibility, not something that happens after the fact.

Understanding Business Risk Is Non-Negotiable

The Forrester research emphasized that successful DevOps leaders understand the business risks associated with both DevOps and Agile adoption. Accelerated delivery pipelines introduce new failure modes—automated deployments can propagate bad code to production faster than any manual process could. Leaders who understand this risk landscape can design appropriate quality gates, rollback strategies, feature flags, and monitoring approaches that mitigate exposure without strangling delivery speed.

Every automated software delivery carries the potential for a negative user experience. The difference between organizations that manage this risk and those that are caught off guard is usually the maturity of their testing practice and the business awareness of their technical leaders.

Expanding Your Skillset as a DevOps Practitioner

Beyond implementing these five practices, DevOps leaders should actively work to broaden their skills across the quality, security, and observability domains. Understanding how to instrument applications for monitoring, how to interpret production telemetry, and how to design systems that fail gracefully are all capabilities that distinguish effective DevOps leaders from those who simply manage pipelines. The goal is not just faster software—it is better software, delivered sustainably.

XebiaLabs Closes 2016 with Triple-Digit Revenue Growth

XebiaLabs, a DevOps and Continuous Delivery software vendor, reported triple-digit year-over-year growth for 2016. The company positioned itself as the only enterprise DevOps vendor focused exclusively on Continuous Delivery, with its Application Release Automation (ARA) platform at the centre of that proposition. In South Africa, XebiaLabs was represented by channel partner 9th BIT Consulting.

According to then-CEO Derek Langone, the growth reflected a measurable shift in enterprise thinking: large organisations were beginning to treat accelerated software delivery not as an IT concern, but as a direct competitive advantage.

“As software has become the primary way that enterprises interact with their customers, the need to deliver innovation, value and high quality user experience has become fundamental to a company’s potential to compete in its respective market. XebiaLabs lives at this convergence of software and business.”

Derek Langone, CEO, XebiaLabs (2017)

Why Application Release Automation Became a DevOps Cornerstone

Application Release Automation (ARA) addresses one of the most persistent pain points in large-scale software delivery: the complexity of coordinating deployments across heterogeneous IT environments. ARA platforms automate, orchestrate and audit the end-to-end release pipeline, giving operations and development teams a single control plane for:

• Automating deployments across diverse infrastructure stacks
• Tracking release progress and compliance status in real time
• Managing dependencies between application components and environments
• Reducing manual handoffs that introduce risk and delay
• Providing audit trails for regulated industries

Barry de Waal, Chief Executive for Strategy and Sales at 9th BIT Consulting, summarised the value proposition for enterprises in the region:

“The Application Release Automation capabilities we offer the enterprise is the cornerstone of successful DevOps endeavours. 9th BIT Consulting provides enterprises with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk, empowering them to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases.”

Barry de Waal, Chief Executive: Strategy and Sales, 9th BIT Consulting (2017)

Key Product Advancements Driving Adoption in 2016

XebiaLabs shipped a series of product updates throughout 2016 that expanded the platform’s capabilities and broadened its integration ecosystem. Notable additions included:

• Customisable reporting and analytics dashboards — surfacing release progress, risk indicators and compliance status in a single view
• Enhanced productivity features for teams managing large-scale, multi-environment deployments
• New DevOps tool integrations — including Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Compose and Ansible, reflecting the industry’s rapid shift toward container-based delivery
• Advanced release orchestration — featuring dependency management, Release Folders for grouping related releases, and Release Tags for flexible categorisation
• Automatic cloud environment provisioning — enabling on-demand infrastructure creation as part of the deployment pipeline

The container and orchestration integrations are particularly noteworthy in hindsight: Kubernetes was still maturing in 2016, and vendors that invested early in Kubernetes support were better positioned as container adoption accelerated through 2017 and beyond.

Analyst Recognition: Leaders Quadrant and Forrester Wave

Industry analyst firms validated XebiaLabs’ market position during 2016. Gartner placed the company in the Leaders Quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for Application Release Automation. Forrester ranked XebiaLabs highest in the Strategy category of the Forrester Wave: Application Release Automation, Q3 2016.

Placement in both major analyst reports simultaneously is significant for an enterprise software vendor, as procurement teams at large organisations frequently use these reports as a shortlisting tool. Recognition in the Leaders Quadrant and a top Strategy ranking would have materially supported XebiaLabs’ sales cycles with risk-averse enterprise buyers.

Market Context: What Was Driving Enterprise DevOps Adoption?

The triple-digit growth figure did not occur in isolation. Several converging forces were pushing large enterprises toward formal DevOps tooling in 2016:

• Digital transformation pressure — incumbents in banking, retail, insurance and telecoms faced competition from software-native challengers and needed to ship product changes faster
• Container adoption — Docker’s mainstream breakthrough (roughly 2015–2016) created new deployment complexity that ARA tooling could help manage
• Compliance and audit requirements — regulated industries needed automation that could also generate deployment records for auditors
• Talent constraints — automation reduced reliance on institutional knowledge held by individual engineers during release cycles

De Waal highlighted economic pressure as an additional driver in the South African context, noting that tighter budgets and increased competition were forcing companies to optimise software delivery as a cost and agility lever rather than treating it purely as a technical function.

What This Means for DevOps Practitioners Today

While this report covers 2016 results, the underlying dynamics it describes have only intensified. ARA capabilities — release orchestration, pipeline visibility, environment automation, compliance tracking — are now expected features of mature DevOps platforms rather than differentiators. The vendors and practitioners who invested early in these areas established a foundation that continues to compound.

For teams evaluating release automation tooling today, the evaluation criteria that mattered in 2016 (integration breadth, analytics, orchestration depth, cloud environment support) remain relevant, with the addition of GitOps patterns, policy-as-code and cloud-native deployment targets as contemporary requirements.

Source: Originally reported by it-online.co.za, August 2017. XebiaLabs was subsequently acquired by CollabNet VersionOne in 2019, and the combined entity was later rebranded as Digital.ai.