An empirical taxonomy of DevOps in practice

Macarthy, R; Bass, J

Abstract

DevOps is described as a software engineering
culture and philosophy that utilises cross-functional teams to
build, test and release software faster and more reliably through
automation. Research shows that its adoption speeds up software
delivery time, improve quality, security, and collaboration in
software development. One controversial issue has been whether
DevOps is an organisation-wide culture or a job description. As
DevOps is an emerging concept, its definitions and best practices
are still hazy, making its implementation in practice less informed
and somewhat risky. The rising trend of DevOps adoption
among software development practitioners therefore heightens
the need for in-depth investigation into its implementation.This
paper seeks to contribute to the above by critically examining
DevOps implementation in practice through an exploratory case
study, based on interviews with 11 industry practitioners across
nine organisations. Transcripts of interviews were coded and
analysed using a method informed by Grounded Theory. This
study provides an empirical taxonomy of DevOps implementation, describing developers’ interaction with On-premises Ops,
Outsourced Ops, DevOps teams, and DevOps bridge teams.
We present a novel mapping of the approaches to on-premises
and cloud-based deployments, and identified the facilitators of
DevOps practices in the different modes. We further identified
three distinct groups of activities in the fourth mode: provisioning
and maintenance of physical systems, function virtualisation and
creation of automated pipelines, and development, deployment
and maintenance of applications, which may have given rise to the
implementation of DevOps as bridge teams. Interviewees claimed
these distinctions allowed developers to focus on delivering value
for the business.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: The 46th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)
• Start Date: Aug 26, 2020
• End Date: Aug 28, 2020
• Acceptance Date: May 19, 2020
• Publication Date: Aug 26, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jun 24, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 2, 2020
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA51224.2020.00046
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference