A Survey of DevOps in the South African Software Context

Abstract

This study investigated DevOps practices and experiences in the South African software development context, along with associated perceptions of benefits and challenges. Survey data collected from a sample of 80 software development professionals showed that more frequent builds, earlier detection of bugs and reduced project lead times were the top three benefits, while getting DevOps capable members into a team, finding experienced professionals to support DevOps practice and changing deep-seated company culture to support DevOps were the top three challenges. DevOps practices are still emerging. Although 85% of respondents report continuous integration as a frequent practice, only 54% report using continuous deployment frequently. The biggest reported impacts of DevOps on software development culture were in making development team members aware of operational faults, responsible for quality assurance, and responsible for deployments. Realisation of benefits from DevOps depends largely on a culture change. Results are useful for guiding organisations considering DevOps adoption.

Factors Enabling and Hindering Value Co-Creation in Continuous Service Development: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In [20], improved culture was connected to more engaged teams, thus positively affecting VCC. However, cultural challenges might also arise from continuous development, especially at the adoption stage, as significant changes to the cultural mindset are required [15], and changing a longstanding organizational culture may prove difficult [6,19]. The reviewed literature reports cultural hindrances to VCC, such as a lack of (organizational) motivation to adopt continuous practices [30] and the difficulty of obtaining buy-in from stakeholders [15].…”

“…[16] suggests that cultural factors, more so than technical factors, may limit the adoption of continuous development. Furthermore, the lack of organizational vision [3], strategic suggestions from management [36], and lack of management support for implementing continuous practices [18,19] were among the found challenges. [15,16,37].…”

“…In [16], continuous development was reported to enable teams to feel more valued, positively affecting their engagement [16]. In turn, actor perceptions may hinder VCC as a result of the challenges of overcoming the Dev versus Ops mentality [36,38], having to adapt mindsets [18,19,39], and actors' unwillingness to accept continuous development [11]. Customers, for example, may not be prepared to handle a shorter release cycle and receive constant updates on service features [14,30].…”

“…There may also be a lack of adequate infrastructure to support automation [17]. Achieving compatibility between DevOps and legacy systems and dealing with applications not suited to continuous development were among the reported architectural challenges [3,15,17,19]. [16] notes that to mitigate these challenges, the continuous development ecosystem should be built over time using an approach based on continuous improvement.…”

“…Extant literature presents various benefits of continuous development for organizations. For example, increased performance and productivity (e.g., [10][11][12]), shorter time to market (e.g., [11,[13][14][15]), cost savings (e.g., [16,17]), improved quality (e.g., [10-14, 18, 19]), enhanced customer and employee experience and satisfaction (e.g., [16,17,20]), and improved employee well-being (e.g., [10,12,19,21]) are among the positive outcomes realized by employing continuous development.…”