A Systematic Literature Review for Investigating DevOps Metrics to Implement in Software Development Organizations

Abstract

DevOps is a collaborative software development process where practitioners work as a team to continuously develop, deploy, and deliver software. DevOps practices still need to be mature, and practitioners face numerous challenges while considering DevOps as a software development process. The mainstream research community has helped simplify the DevOps adoption process and eliminate complexities by developing DevOps maturity models. However, the current maturity frameworks cannot measure every component of DevOps and do not mention metrics as parameters for measuring different DevOps practices or features. Therefore, this study aims to identify metrics for measuring practices and activities responsible for DevOps implementation. The systematic literature review (SLR) method was used to determine the metrics needed to measure DevOps practices. Using SLR, we have identified 32 metrics from 57 articles. The metrics identified in this study can be used to measure the impact of the practices adopted for DevOps implementation within software development organizations. Furthermore, we divided the identified metrics into Dev and Ops categories and five significant categories based on the DevOps lifecycle. The classification of metrics in our study into diverse regions provides a conceptual framework and understanding of DevOps measures.