Management Challenges for DevOps Adoption within UK SMEs

The DevOps phenomenon is gathering pace as more UK organisations seek to leverage the benefits it can potentially bring to software engineering functions. However substantial organisational change is inherent to adopting DevOps, especially where there are prior and established methods. As part of a wider piece of doctoral research investigating the management challenges of DevOps adoption, we present early findings of a six month qualitative diary study following the adoption of DevOps within a UK based SME with over 200 employees. We find that within our case study organisation, the DevOps approach is being adopted for the development of a new system used both internally and by customers. DevOps, conceptually, appears to be generally well regarded, but in reality is proving difficult to fully adopt. This difficulty is down to a combination of necessity in maintaining a legacy system, lack of senior management buy-in, managerial structure and resistance. Additionally, we are finding evidence of job crafting, especially with the software developers. Taken together, we put forward the argument that DevOps is an interdisciplinary topic which would greatly benefit from further management and potentially psychology oriented research attention

The DevOps Funnel: Introducing DevOps as an Antecedent for Digitalization in Large-Scale Organizations

Business productivity and speed to market are among the top priorities of IS managers to stay successful. To achieve these goals, a change in business processes or models is often required, which is often linked to the phenomenon of digitalization. Enterprises have observed that a holistic approach to agile IS development is essential to enable this change, leading to the concept of “DevOps”. While past studies have delivered first insights about DevOps, an understanding of which factors are important to introduce DevOps in organizations, and how DevOps relates to digitalization, is still missing. To close this gap, we conducted a two-staged study of literature review and multiple-case study. Our findings suggest that DevOps links success and practices for development and operations across actors of different organizational levels. We find that DevOps supports digitalization efforts, contribute to the understanding of the DevOps phenomenon and identify worthwhile paths for further research

DevOps: Walking the Shadowy Bridge from Development Success to Information Systems Success

In recent years enterprises have observed that a holistic approach to agile information systems development and a closer integration of information systems development with information systems operations is essential to maximize the probability of success, leading to the emerging DevOps phenomenon. While past research delivers insights about success criteria in information systems development as well as information systems operations, conceptual inclusion of DevOps is missing. We propose a multi-staged qualitative research design including literature review and multiple-case study to explore and identify origins of critical success criteria used to measure success by the two major IT-related enterprises functions IT development and IT operations. Based on that, we aim to contribute a “DevOps model”, from a success criteria perspective, and reconcile information systems development with the Information Systems Success Model. In addition, our research significantly fosters understanding of the DevOps phenomenon and identifies paths for future research

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

The Empire Strikes Back: The end of Agile as we know it?

Agile methods have co-evolved with the onset of rapid change in software and systems development and the methodologies and process models designed to guide them. Conceived from the lessons of practice, Agile methods brought a balanced perspective between the intentions of the stakeholder, the management function, and developers. As an evolutionary progression, trends towards rapid continuous delivery have witnessed the advent of DevOps where advances in tooling, technologies, and the environment of both development and consumption exert a new dynamic into the Agile oeuvre. We investigate the progression from Agile to DevOps from a Critical Social Theoretic perspective to examine a paradox in agility – does an always-on conceptualization of production forestall and impinge upon the processes of reflection and renewal that are also endemic to Agile methods? This paper is offered as a catalyst for critical examination of and as a call to action to advocate for sustaining and nurturing reflective practice in Agile and post-Agile methods, such as DevOps. Under threat of disenfranchisement and relegation to automation, we question how evolution towards DevOps may alter key elements in the tenets and principles of the Agile methods phenomenon

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

ARE YOU READY FOR DEVOPS? REQUIRED SKILL SET FOR DEVOPS TEAMS

In order to react quickly to changing environments and build a customer-centric setup, more and more organizations are deciding to work with the agile IT software development approach. But for the fast delivery of new software features in very short time, other parts of the IT department are necessary as well. Hence, the DevOps concept appears and connects development to IT operations activities within service-centric IT teams. To date, there has been very little empir-ical research on the skills required for the successful setup of a DevOps-oriented IT team. This study addresses this gap by conducting a multi-perspective research. We have collected data with the help of a workshop and interviews with IT experts. Seven skill categories—full-stack development, analysis, functional, decision-making, social, testing, and advisory skills—with 36 concrete skills were identified. Our study highlights that a combination of distinct development, operations, and management skills is necessary to successfully work within a DevOps team. This research explains core DevOps skill categories and provides a deeper understanding of the skill set of an ideal DevOps team setting. We describe these skills and skill categories and list their implications for research and practice

DevOps Adoption: Challenges & Barriers

As a modern software engineering paradigm, DevOps has recently gained increasing acceptance in the industry as a set of practices and cultural values to address daily dynamic software demands. While the rising trend of DevOps and its characteristics and challenges have often been characterized by practitioner communities and academic research circles, there is still a lack of a thorough understanding of how to tackle DevOps adoptions. This paper aims to help fill this gap by identifying, discussing, and summarizing current academic and practitioner DevOps adoption & implementation research. Our findings provide a basis for theoretical, empirical, or design-oriented research for IS scholars, that has the potential to be of practical importance. Our goal is to improve understanding of DevOps adoption by uncovering ambiguities in terms, conceptual conflations, and ideas underlying different uses of the concept as well as providing methods to deal with common challenges in the adoption process