DevOps in Practice -- A preliminary Analysis of two Multinational Companies

DevOps is a cultural movement that aims the collaboration of all the stakeholders involved in the development, deployment and operation of soft-ware to deliver a quality product or service in the shortest possible time. DevOps is relatively recent, and companies have developed their DevOps prac-tices largely from scratch. Our research aims to conduct an analysis on practic-ing DevOps in +20 software-intensive companies to provide patterns of DevOps practices and identify their benefits and barriers. This paper presents the preliminary analysis of an exploratory case study based on the interviews to relevant stakeholders of two (multinational) companies. The results show the benefits (software delivery performance) and barriers that these companies are dealing with, as well as DevOps team topology they approached during their DevOps transformation. This study aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand DevOps transformations and the contexts where the practices worked. This, hopefully, will contribute to strengthening the evidence regarding DevOps and supporting practitioners in making better informed decisions about the return of investment when adopting DevOps.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, conferenc

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

Leading Devops practice and principle adoption

This research, undertaken in highly structured software-intensive organizations, outlines challenges associated to agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles adoption. The approach collected data via a series of thirty (30) interviews, with practitioners from the EMEA region (Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Georgia, Greece, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, UK), working in nine (9) different industry domains and ten (10) different countries. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles, which organizations choose to include in their DevOps adoption journeys were identified. The most frequently adopted structured service management practices, contributing to DevOps practice adoption success, indicate that those with software development and operation roles in DevOps-oriented organizations benefit from existence of highly structured service management approaches such as ITIL®

Evolution of Integration, Build, Test, and Release Engineering Into DevOps and to DevSecOps

Software engineering operations in large organizations are primarily comprised of integrating code from multiple branches, building, testing the build, and releasing it. Agile and related methodologies accelerated the software development activities. Realizing the importance of the development and operations teams working closely with each other, the set of practices that automated the engineering processes of software development evolved into DevOps, signifying the close collaboration of both development and operations teams. With the advent of cloud computing and the opening up of firewalls, the security aspects of software started moving into the applications leading to DevSecOps. This chapter traces the journey of the software engineering operations over the last two to three decades, highlighting the tools and techniques used in the process

Exploring the link between leadership and Devops practice and principle adoption

Our research focuses in software-intensive organizations and highlights the challenges that surface as a result of the transitioning process of highly-structured to DevOps practices and principles adoption. The approach collected data via a series of thirty (30) interviews, with practitioners from the EMEA region (Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Georgia, Greece, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, UK), working in nine (9) different industry domains and ten (10) different countries. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles were identified, which organizations select as part of DevOps-oriented adoption. The most frequently adopted ITIL® service management practices, contributing to DevOps practice and principle adoption success, indicate that DevOps-oriented organizations benefit from the existence of change management, release and deployment management, service level management, incident management and service catalog management. We also uncover that the DevOps adoption leadership role is required in a DevOps team setting and that it should, initially, be an individual role

Enterprise Agility: Why Is Transformation so Hard?

Enterprise agility requires capabilities to transform, sense and seize new business opportunities more quickly than competitors. However, acquiring those capabilities, such as continuous delivery and scaling agility to product programmes, portfolios and business models, is challenging in many organisations. This paper introduces definitions of enterprise agility involving business management and cultural lenses for analysing large-scale agile transformation. The case organisation, in the higher education domain, leverages collaborative discovery sprints and an experimental programme to enable a bottom-up approach to transformation. Meanwhile the prevalence of bureaucracy and organisational silos are often contradictory to agile principles and values. The case study results identify transformation challenges based on observations from a five-month research period. Initial findings indicate that increased focus on organisational culture and leveraging of both bottom-up innovation and supportive top-down leadership activities, could enhance the likelihood of a successful transformation

Adopting DevOps Principles, Practices and Tools : Case: Identity & Access Management

Adopting DevOps has been of interest for many organizations and practitioners for a while now due to its various benefits for business. However, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding on what is meant by DevOps when it comes to the key concepts, practices, tools, and the benefits and challenges of DevOps adoption. Organizations and teams are missing guidance on how to adopt DevOps in their specific context. This design science research is conducted to understand how to adopt DevOps principles, practices and tools in the Identity and Access Management of a large multinational corporation. The result of this study are the proposed models for adopting DevOps, including the formation of the teams and the processes covering build, test and deployment of identity management system (SailPoint IIQ) and onboarding new applications to the system. Three design artifacts are built and evaluated against identified problem areas in DevOps adoption, providing insights to the research community and industry practitioners

Jatkuvaan ohjelmistokehitykseen siirtyminen vakiintuneessa organisaatiossa

Software development today has rapidly developed into a significant part of business and its value creation chain. Increasingly more stakeholders within an organization are tied in with more frequent software releases. This has driven organizations to adapt to more flexible and continuous software development methods. This Master’s Thesis addresses the challenges, advantages and disadvantages associated in shifting an organization’s software development culture towards that of continuous development. The specific type of continuous development within this research considers the new software development culture of DevOps. DevOps is seen as a fundamental change in the IT world today for the transition towards continuous software development, where dedication is given to the successful collaboration between development and operations. The aim of this research is to discover the vastness of attempting to change an organizational culture for an improved and modern software development process for all stakeholders involved. Furthermore, this research attempts to provide the organization at hand with information on how and where to begin initiating the required changes. New cloud computing technologies have enabled development teams to become less dependent on companies’ traditional IT departments. The research is conducted via literature review and the data collected through interviews with employees of the organization attempting to shift towards continuous development. Further information is gathered through three case studies of other companies that have successfully undergone a transition towards continuous development and DevOps.Tänä päivänä ohjelmistokehityksestä on nopeasti muodostunut merkittävä osa liiketoimintaa ja sen lisäarvon tuottamista. Yhtiöiden sisällä yhä useampi sidosryhmä on osallisena yhä useammin toistuvissa ohjelmistojulkaisuissa. Tästä johtuen yritykset ovat joutuneet sopeutumaan joustaviin ja jatkuviin tapoihin kehittää ohjelmistoa. Tämä diplomityö tutkii yhtiön jatkuvaan ohjelmistokehitykseen siirtymisen haasteita, hyötyjä ja haittoja. Jatkuvan ohjelmistokehityksen tyyppi, jota tässä työssä tutkitaan, on nimeltään DevOps. DevOps:ia pidetään keskeisenä muutoksena nykypäivän IT-alalla jatkuvaan kehitykseen siirtymisessä. Sen pääpiirteeksi koetaan sulava yhteistyö kehityksen ja ylläpidon välillä. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoite on selvittää yrityksen ohjelmistokehityksen muuttamisen laajuuden ottamalla samalla sen kaikki sidosryhmät huomioon. Lisäksi tämä tutkimus pyrkii tuottamaan yritykselle, jolle tutkimus tehdään, lisätietoa siitä miten tarvittavat muutokset voidaan käynnistää ja toteuttaa. Uudet pilvipalvelut ovat lisänneet kehityksen autonomisia työskentelytapoja ja vähentäneet heidän riippuvuuksia perinteisen IT-osaston toiminnollisuuksista. Tutkimus toteutetaan kirjallisuuskatsauksen sekä yrityksen eri sidosryhmien haastattelujen kautta. Lisätietoa kerätään esimerkkien avulla, joissa tutkitaan kolmen eri yrityksen menestyksekkäitä siirtymisiä jatkuvan ohjelmistokehityksen pariin

Why and How do Large-scale Organizations Operationalize DevOps

An essential part of organizational efforts is to provide products to customers. To sustain competitive positions on existing markets, and to expand into new markets, firms utilize and continuously optimize approaches to efficiently provide effective products. Meanwhile, applying agile practices is a commoditized way for organizations to better adapt to changes during the development of their products. For bringing products to customers, more than their development is required. Typically, multiple organizational functions, all with individual goals and practices, are included in the development and delivery of products. This is often associated with friction points between those functions, and hinders the optimization of effectiveness and efficiency in providing products to customers. In retrospective, not all firms were able to recalibrate themselves and find back to former success after they had once missed to (again) innovate by timely addressing changes on their existing markets, discovering unmet or changed customer needs, and providing new products that bring together emerging technology with evolving customer demands. This potential threat now appears to be omnipresent with the ongoing proliferation of digitalization through the practical world of all of us. The emerging phenomenon of DevOps, a portmanteau word of “development” and “operations”, describes approaches to streamline development and delivery of products across organizational functions, to efficiently provide effective products, and to enable organizational digitalization efforts. This dissertation sheds light on reasoning, configurational factors, and dynamics behind DevOps implementations in large-scale. The composition of four independent yet interrelated scientific papers, the cornerstones of this dissertation, answers why and how large-scale organizations operationalize DevOps. In sum, this dissertation adds systematic and foundational knowledge, presents new applications and nuanced concretizations of scientific empiric approaches, connects allied but distinct research communities, and provides guidance for practitioners acting in this timely, relevant and interesting domain