Coordination of development and operations activities in agile software development

Macarthy, RW

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. As an emerging concept, its definitions and best practices are still ambiguous. However, interest in DevOps and its adoption continue to rise significantly among industry practitioners. The unclear nature of the concept presents organisations with a wide range of unstructured choices, and few guidelines to navigate through a plethora of valuable information.

To contribute to understanding of the subject and to a more structured implementation, this study employs a mixed method qualitative approach to investigates the practice of DevOps in four phases. Phase one investigates the perceptions of DevOps and its associated practices, based on interviews with 11 industry practitioners across nine organisations. Phase 2 critically examines the DevOps implementation through interviews with 14
practitioners who lead DevOps transformation in their respective organisations. In both phases, transcripts of interviews were coded and analysed using a method informed by grounded theory. The first phase identifies four different modes of DevOps implementation. A novel taxonomy is presented, which maps the approaches to cloud and on-premises deployment environments. In phase 2, six strategies of DevOps implementation were identified and uniquely characterised, with a critical examination of the roles of skillset and automation in the strategies. A combination of literature and theories generated from our data analysis led to the extension of an existing situational method engineering model, to create a novel model for DevOps implementation in phase three.
The model is evaluated by engaging with expert practitioners in a Focus Group workshop. The evaluation shows that the model provides clarity and better understanding DevOps implementation to practitioners.

Arising from the workshop, a physical instantiation of the model was created in a repository. This versioncontrolled repository provides practitioners with the opportunity to collaboratively determine their DevOps strategy and keep track of the improvement journey. This thesis concludes that organisations can implement DevOps in a structured and well-informed manner following the guidelines provided by our model.

Citation

Macarthy, R. Coordination of development and operations activities in agile software development. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Apr 12, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 12, 2023
• Award Date: Oct 27, 2022