Learning material and recommendations to accomplish DevOps/Release engineer tasks in a MS based project?

Question

I know it's not quite QA related to be asked here but since all my background is as a QA I thought I'd give it a shoot. Besides this, I noticed that higher seniority jobs also require more or less devops knowledge too

A bit of background on the project:

• Microsoft technology based project consisting in a Windows Service with an in-house WebServer as a wrapper (so I’m not talking about IIS)
• Customers get the installer, install the product and use it by accessing the web interface
• Git for source control and Visual Studio Online
• A few unit tests that run after every commit, a couple of integration tests that run nightly and soon we’ll have some UI (Selenium) tests that will be run nightly and weekly, so a basic CI/CD is in place already.

A bit of background about me:

• automation engineer with a couple of years of experience with C#, Selenium, MSTest, NUnit and others
• know my way around programming (C# .NET mostly) somewhere to a intermediate developer level

What we want in the team, is to have someone (I volunteered) that takes ownership of Devops / release engineer tasks.

The problem is that no one has the experience with these kind of “tasks” (meaning what should we start with besides what we already have) so I’d want to take it slowly and build on what we have, preferably without making massive changes (in terms of processes, tools, etc) right from the start. Besides this, any learning material on new tools, processes, way of working is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

First of all, I do not think you should be worried about that no one has the experience with these kind of tasks.

• We all start from knowing nothing. It is almost a daily task for us to offer a solution to something we know nothing about.

Do you have someone in mind that will volunteer for this job?

• Ask in a team meeting for a volunteer to take up this role. As Agile principles state, the best solution always comes from self-motivating and self-organizing teams. A volunteer will more pro-actively learn and perform.

If I was you, how would I approach this:

• As you said, start from small. Can you break down those tasks further? Pick up those essential ones and assign them to this volunteer. See what kind of problems there will be. E.g. build a miniature version of this role with minimum amount of work to start with, then gradually expand workload.

Some essential skills are:

• Basic C# programming knowledge, free C# reference is here
• How to coordinate with customers and developers, How to be assertive How to deliver bad news
• Git source control Git online reference
• Familiar with basic testing terminologies and techniques ISTQB foundation syllabus