A bstract-The constant changes in the software industry, practices, and methodologies impose challenges to teaching and learning current software engineering concepts and skills. DevOps is particularly challenging because it covers technical concepts, such as pipeline automation, and non-technical ones, such as team roles and project management. The present study investigates a course setup to introduce these concepts to software engineering undergraduates. We designed the course by employing coding to associate DevOps concepts to Agile, Lean, and Open source practices and tools. We present the main aspects of this projectoriented DevOps course, with 240 students enrolled it since its first offering in 2016. We conducted an empirical study, with both a quantitative and qualitative analysis, to evaluate this projectoriented course setup. We collected the data from the projects repository and students' perceptions from a questionnaire. We mined 148 repositories (corresponding to 72 projects) and obtained 86 valid responses to the questionnaire. We also mapped the concepts which are more challenging to students learn from experience. The results evidence that first-hand experience facilitates the comprehension of DevOps concepts and enriches classes discussions. we present a set of lessons learned, which may help professors better design and conduct project-oriented courses to cover DevOps concepts.In d e x Terms-DevOps, education, Open source, OSS, FOSS, Empirical software engineering, Agile software development, Emerging domains of software, Tools and environments.

Context: DevOps responds to the growing need of companies to streamline the software development process and, thus, have experienced a widespread adoption in the past few years. However, successful adoption of DevOps requires companies to address important cultural and organizational changes. Understanding the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps is key, and comprehending the existing theories and representations of team taxonomies is critical to guide companies in a more systematic and structured DevOps adoption process. Objective: This paper presents empirical research on the structure of DevOps teams in software-producing organizations. The goal is to better understand the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps by harmonizing the existing knowledge. Method: To do this, we conducted a grounded theory study, analyzing existing studies on DevOps teams and taxonomies. Results: From the analysis, we built a substantive and analytic theory of DevOps taxonomies. The theory is substantive in that the scope of validity refers to the ten primary studies processed and analytic in that it analyzes “what is” rather than explaining causality or attempting predictive generalizations. A public repository with all the data related to the products resulting from the analysis and generation of the theory is available. Conclusions: We built a theory on DevOps taxonomies and tested whether it harmonizes the existing taxonomies, i.e., whether our theory can instantiate the others. This is the first step to define which taxonomies are best suited to approach DevOps culture and practices according to the companies’ objectives and capabilities.

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The constant changes in the software industry, practices, and methodologies impose challenges to teaching and learning current software engineering concepts and skills. DevOps is particularly challenging because it covers technical concepts, such as pipeline automation, and non-technical ones, such as team roles and project management. The present study investigates a course setup to introduce these concepts to software engineering undergraduates. We designed the course by employing coding to associate DevOps concepts to Agile, Lean, and Open source practices and tools. We present the main aspects of this projectoriented DevOps course, with 240 students enrolled it since its first offering in 2016. We conducted an empirical study, with both a quantitative and qualitative analysis, to evaluate this projectoriented course setup. We collected the data from the projects repository and students' perceptions from a questionnaire. We mined 148 repositories (corresponding to 72 projects) and obtained 86 valid responses to the questionnaire. We also mapped the concepts which are more challenging to students learn from experience. The results evidence that first-hand experience facilitates the comprehension of DevOps concepts and enriches classes discussions. we present a set of lessons learned, which may help professors better design and conduct project-oriented courses to cover DevOps concepts.

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