DevOps in practice: A multiple case study of five companies

Abstract

Context: DevOps is considered important in the ability to frequently and reliably update a system in operational state. DevOps presumes cross-functional collaboration and automation between software development and operations. DevOps adoption and implementation in companies is non-trivial due to required changes in technical, organisational and cultural aspects. Objectives: This exploratory study presents detailed descriptions of how DevOps is implemented in practice. The context of our empirical investigation is web application and service development in small and medium sized companies. Method: A multiple-case study was conducted in five different development contexts with successful DevOps implementations since its benefits, such as quick releases and minimum deployment errors, were achieved. Data was mainly collected through interviews with 26 practitioners and observations made at the companies. Data was analysed by first coding each case individually using a set of predefined themes and thereafter perform a cross-case synthesis. Results: Our analysis yielded some of the following results: (i) software development team attaining ownership and responsibility to deploy software changes in production is crucial in DevOps. (ii) toolchain usage and support in deployment pipeline activities accelerates the delivery of software changes, bug fixes and handling of production incidents. (ii) the delivery speed to production is affected by context factors, such as manual approvals by the product owner (iii) steep learning curve for new skills is experienced by both software developers and operations staff, who also have to cope with working under pressure. Conclusion:Our findings contributes to the overall understanding of DevOps concept, practices and its perceived impacts, particularly in small and medium sized companies. We discuss two practical implications of the results.

Readiness model for DevOps implementation in software organizations

“…The traditional software development approaches such as waterfall and iterative models do not explicitly focus on these tasks. The work done by Lwakatare et al 14 also shows agreement on a proposed concept; that is, DevOps is a coordination between development and operational teams. On the other hand, some researchers are against restricting DevOps to coordination task because various sources and tasks are involved to fulfill requirements for software development and operations 15 .…”

Multicriteria decision‐making taxonomy for DevOps challenging factors using analytical hierarchy process

“…Bureaucratic deployment process Ibrahim et al, 53 Shahin et al, 67 Kuusinen et al, 68 Lwakatare et al 69…”

“…Organization becomes a challenge for DevOps practices because of its rules and bureaucracy. 68,69 4.9 | Lack of organizational interest (Ch9)…”

The evolution of software development orchestration: current state and an agenda for future research

“…A similar pattern can be observed for DevOps where research started with asking "What is DevOps?" (Jabbari et al (2016) and then shifted attention to providing practice-based accounts of DevOps adoption and challenges (Lwakatare et al, 2019;toh et al, 2019), the need for alignment of the Dev and Ops function to DevOps (Iden et al, 2013), evaluations of DevOps success (Hüttermann & Rosenkranz, 2019), and core characteristics of the DevOps phenomenon (required skill sets (Hemon et al, 2019); automation practices (Fitzgerald & Stol, 2017)). The articles in this special issue capture the DevOps phenomena at the time of its full arrival in practice and can be seen as evidence for the pervasiveness of software in business operations and the push towards tighter integration of software development and operations.…”