IMO moving towards DevOps is a very natural direction for testers who are on fast moving delivery teams. When I was on a team completing releasable features almost daily and had a ratio of more than 5 developers to 1 tester, I realised that the value I could bring was in enabling, not owning. I think that would be my advice…DevOps is all about connecting the developing and operating of services so how can you as a tester improve this? Could be as simple as asking about logging while testing a story, or it could be more involved like designing automated pipelines for continuous delivery.
Some more quick win examples include introducing faster forms of feedback like code linting and parallelising of tests or automating previously manual jobs like running certain commands or emailing someone for review. Most importantly, you need to think of ways to help solve needs without owning the long term implementation of their solution.
I think this is very true and I think it is most difficult because of the barrier to entry on new tooling. Not only are many software engineers and testers not exposed to the operations side of things, they often aren’t even granted logins and access when they ask! I believe understanding the tools that are available are a great way to generate ideas and fundementally necessay to advocate for what you need. If you are in a space where you don’t have operational access and want to get hands on experience using logs and metrics and traces to debug a distributed system you can use awesome OSS tools like we are for the London Tester Gathering workshop.