Today’s digital landscape demands shorten development time from request to implementation that allows greater business innovation. Companies that can release software early and frequently have a higher capability to compete in the market. Innovative companies, such as Google, Amazon, and Netflix, are characterized for fast speed in releases and quick response time to customer demands.
To deal with challenges of deploying software updates on continuous basis to production environment whilst also ensure reliable operability of the live environment, an organizational approach—also referred as a cultural movement and a technical solution—named DevOps has recently appeared.
DevOps (2008) is an approach to address the necessity of shifting towards fast and frequent delivery of software updates to the customer. DevOps “breaks down organizational silos” and “stresses empathy and cross-functional collaboration within and between teams—especially development and IT operations—in order to operate resilient systems and accelerate delivery of changes”. DevOps relies on well-known principles inspired by Lean Thinking (1996) and Agile Software Development (2001), and practices, such as, continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) that aim to put every change into production through the automation of integration and deployment pipelines, resulting in many production deployments every day.
However, DevOps does not have methodologies such as Scrum and eXtreme programing, and thus companies have developed their DevOps practices largely from scratch—by training employees on the fly. DevOps embodies a vast and diverse set of practices, from which some patterns can be generically applied under certain conditions, depending on the environment.
This study conducts an exploratory case on practicing DevOps in software-intensive multinational companies in order to provide patterns of DevOps practices and identify their benefits and barriers. The case study is being conducted through interviews to relevant stakeholders in these companies. The interview consists of almost 100 questions and takes about 2.5 hours (personal and organizational questions, open-questions, semi-open questions, etc.).
All data gathered is anonymized and participating companies will have access to the study results. All those companies wishing to advertise that have participated in the study may do so.
The purpose of this study is to post most important results on journals and other media (including UPM and itSMF websites).
