Industry-Academy Collaboration in Teaching DevOps and Continuous Delivery to Software Engineering Students: Towards Improved Industrial Relevance in Higher Education

Abstract

Global industrial demand for highly skilled professional software engineers is increasing. Many countries already experience shortage of developer workforce and it is predicted that the industrial need for software engineers will grow on a higher rate than educational institutes are able to train new workforce. The main reasons for this deficit are in the education system's inability to adapt to current market needs and in difficulties in matching available skills with existing jobs. Therefore, increasing the industrial and market relevance of the education can be a key solution. Another significant contributor is teaching more efficient working methods such as automating repetitive parts of developer work to help to concentrate on tasks that directly create customer and business value. This paper presents the design and execution of a Continuous Delivery and DevOps course organized in company-university collaboration. The objective is to investigate how university courses requiring multidisciplinary lecturer skills and complex execution architectures can be organized in industry-academia collaboration to improve the industrial relevance of higher education.