A connection working as a QA lead asked a question that a lot of manual testers wonder about: do you really need programming to move into DevOps? In this episode I go through his questions one by one and share what I told him, based on an article I wrote on the same topic a while back.

• DevOps is built on three principles: increasing flow, taking regular feedback, and continuous learning through experimentation, not just tools
• Automation is a big part of DevOps, but DevOps and automation are not the same thing even though people treat them that way
• The DevOps Foundation course from DevOps Institute does not require any programming knowledge and has no coding questions on the exam
• You do need basic understanding of script control structures to do well in test automation
• Programming requirement depends heavily on the tool you pick, something like Cucumber needs domain knowledge while Selenium needs JavaScript level skills
• Your role matters too, test case writers need stronger coding skills while leads and managers mainly need to be able to read code
• Manual testers without programming knowledge can still succeed in DevOps depending on their role, but some programming knowledge gives a real advantage
• You do not need to master a language, just understand control structures and be able to read and understand code
• DevOps also includes agile and other practices where you can contribute without touching any code
• DevOps Institute has a separate course specifically for QA people
• If you want to pick up one language as a tester, JavaScript is the most popular choice right now