Designing Grit: Discovering Features Towards Supporting Novice Programmer DevOps Integration

Abstract

DevOps is usually an industry approach that is practiced by seasoned and experienced programmers and developers. In most university settings especially in the Philippine context, DevOps is not usually part of the curriculum and in some cases are only introduced to learner programmers as an elective or as bonus material. We refer to these students in computing degree programs starting out in learning programming, as novice programmers. Upon graduation, these developers transition into industry roles where they are expected to be familiar with DevOps practices [18]. In most cases, they are not prepared, and fortunately, a great number of them are given training before fully transitioning into their hired roles. In this paper, we attempt to discover and design an intervention mechanism that can assist and prepare novice programmers to easily learn DevOps at an early stage. We gathered data and insights from novice programmers and inquired into their pains and struggles in learning and practicing DevOps. To help them in this process, we propose Grit, a prototype tool to support novice programmers in integrating DevOps. Initial insights provided affordances and design elements for a version control prototype with targetted intervention features. In the long run we intend to discover more insights involving the other stages in DevOps beyond version control.