Aligning Academic with Industrial Needs: Investigating DevOps Teaching Practices

Over recent years, DevOps has gained more attention within the software industry, owing to its pivotal role in facilitating continuous software delivery. The significant demand for DevOps practitioners necessitates substantial adjustments in conventional software engineering courses in higher educational institutions. Recent studies have highlighted DevOps principles, challenges, best practices, and tools to facilitate continuous delivery and deployment pipelines from an industrial perspective. As numerous universities are now introducing courses related to DevOps for students majoring in software engineering and computer science, this high demand for DevOps practitioners requires non-trivial adjustments in traditional software engineering courses and educational methodologies, including practices for teaching DevOps, training in DevOps, the level to which DevOps is currently taught and applied to measure the gap between teaching practices compared to industrial requirements. Our vision paper aims to highlight the crucial need for updated policies and tools to improve DevOps training in higher education, providing guidelines. By aligning academic curricula with industry standards, we can ensure students are better equipped for the demands of the workforce, fostering a seamless transition from academia to industry and promoting innovation in software engineering practices.