DevOps Adoption Benefits and Challenges in Practice: A Case Study

Abstract

Abstract. DevOps is an approach in which traditional software engineering roles are merged and communication is enhanced to improve the production release frequency and maintain software quality. There seem to be benefits in adopting DevOps but practical industry experiences have seldom been reported. We conducted a qualitative multiple-case study and interviewed the representatives of three software development organizations in Finland. The responses indicate that with DevOps, practitioners can increase the frequency of releases and improve test automation practices. DevOps was seen to encourage collaboration between departments which boosts communication and employee welfare. Continuous releases enable a more experimental approach and rapid feedback collection. The challenges include communication structures that hinder cross-department collaboration and having to address the cultural shift. Dissimilar development and production environments were mentioned as some of the technical barriers. DevOps might not also be suitable for all industries. Ambiguity in the definition of DevOps makes adoption difficult since organizations might not know which practices they should implement for DevOps.

Should I Stay or Should I Go? On Forces that Drive and Prevent MBSE Adoption in the Embedded Systems Industry

“…The same forces also appeared in our study. Riungu-Kalliosaari et al [17] performed a case study on the adoption of DevOps in industry, where they identified five high-level adoption challenges. Three of these challenges were also mentioned as inertia or anxiety factors in our study, namely deep-seated company culture, industry constraints and feasibility, and unclear methodology.…”

DevOps Capabilities, Practices, and Challenges

“…One view identifies DevOps as a specific job description that requires a combination of software development and IT operations skills, and the other argues that the spirit of DevOps addresses an emerging need in contemporary software development rather than a job position. In an attempt to address this issue, one of the two main streams of research in DevOps has strived on achieving a 2 clear understanding of (i) of definitions and characterization of DevOps and its associated practices [7,[10][11][12][13], and (ii) the benefits and challenges of adopting DevOps [7,8]. For example, while Culture, Automation, Measurement, Sharing, Services have been identified as the main dimensions of DevOps [10], others have described it as a cultural movement that enables rapid development with four defining characteristics: open communication, incentive and responsibility alignment, respect, and trust [14].…”

“…However, as observed in recent studies, despite their growing popularity, there is a lack of empirical research on the actual practice of DevOps beyond a discussion of blog posts and industrial surveys [6,7]. Beyond very few case studies [8], the current literature does not provide much insight on the actual implementation and practices of DevOps and their effectiveness in supporting continuous software development. In this research, we investigate these issues based on an in-depth exploratory case study.…”

Multicriteria decision‐making taxonomy for DevOps challenging factors using analytical hierarchy process

“…The first clearly defines and characterizes the DevOps approach 13,16,17 and understands the benefits and challenges of implementing DevOps practices. 13,18 For example, some studies identified collaboration, automation, and services as the key characteristics of DevOps. 16,19 Others treated it as a cultural movement that drives the developmental environment through close communication, control, and responsibility arrangements.…”

“…DevOps<-data.frame (evaluator1=c (2,6,7,5,10,4,8,3,9,1,13,11,16,20,12,18,17,14,15,18), evaluator2=c (8,5,7,2,3,4,9,10,6,1,11,12,13,21,15,14,19,16,18,17)…”