Development and Operations (DevOps), a particular type of Continuous Software Engineering, has become a popular Software System Engineering paradigm. Software architecture is critical in succeeding with DevOps. However, there is little evidence-based knowledge of how software systems are architected in the industry to enable and support DevOps. Since architectural decisions, along with their rationales and implications, are very important in the architecting process, we performed an industrial case study that has empirically identified and synthesized the key architectural decisions considered essential to DevOps transformation by two software development teams. Our study also reveals that apart from the chosen architecture style, DevOps works best with modular architectures. In addition, we found that the performance of the studied teams can improve in DevOps if operations specialists are added to the teams to perform the operations tasks that require advanced expertise. Finally, investment in testing is inevitable for the teams if they want to release software changes faster.
DevOps has gained high importance in the global software industry due to the ease of software development, testing and deployment it provides. However, the Saudi software industry has not been able to adopt DevOps at a great pace due to various factors. This study, thus, aimed to examine different factors that hindered the adoption of DevOps in the Saudi software industry. Also, recommendations are provided at the end for Saudi Arabia to enhance the adoption of DevOps in its software industry. To accomplish the aims, this study used a literature review and interviews to gather data and examine…
Integrating security activities into the software development lifecycle to detect security flaws is essential for any project. These activities produce reports that must be managed and looped back to project stakeholders like developers to enable security improvements. This so-called Feedback Loop is a crucial part of any project and is required by various industrial security standards and models. However, the operation of this loop presents a variety of challenges. These challenges range from ensuring that feedback data is of sufficient quality over providing different stakeholders with the i…
The software development industry has been evolving with new development standards and service delivery models. Agile methodologies have reached their completion with DevOps, thereby increasing the quality of the software and creating greater speed in delivery. However, a gap regarding the formalization of its adoption and implementation doubts became relevant. My hypothesis is that, by systematizing the introduction of DevOps into the software development process and defining the function of the members of the DevOps team members, may well make it quicker to implement this process, thus reduc…
Context: DevOps and microservices are acknowledged to be important new paradigms to tackle contemporary software demands and provide capabilities for rapid and reliable software development. Industrial reports show that they are quickly adopted together in massive software companies. However, because of the technical and organizational requirements, many difficulties against efficient implementation of the both emerge in real software teams. Objectives: This study aims to discover the organization, benefits and issues of software teams using DevOps & microservices from an immersive perspective…
Processing and reviewing nightly test execution failure logs for large industrial systems is a tedious activity. Furthermore, multiple failures might share one root/common cause during test execution sessions, and the review might therefore require redundant efforts. This paper presents the LogGrouper approach for automated grouping of failure logs to aid root/common cause analysis and for enabling the processing of each log group as a batch. LogGrouper uses state-of-art natural language processing and clustering approaches to achieve meaningful log grouping. The approach is evaluated in an in…
In software industry, the DevOps is an increasingly adopting software development paradigm. Towards the sustainable DevOps adoption, there is a need to transform the organization Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing (CAMS) aspects concerning to core theme of continues development and operations. The software organizations face several complexities while implementing the DevOps principles. The sustainable DevOps implementation assist the software organizations to develop the quality projects with good return on investment. This evidence-based study aims to explore the guidelines of sust…
Software architecture is critical in succeeding with DevOps. However, designing software architectures that enable and support DevOps (DevOps-driven software architectures) is a challenge for organizations. We assert that one of the essential steps towards characterizing DevOps-driven architectures is to understand architectural design issues raised in DevOps. At the same time, some of the architectural issues that emerge in the DevOps context (and their corresponding architectural practices or tactics) may stem from the context (i.e., domain) and characteristics of software organizations. To …
The constant changes in the software industry, practices, and methodologies impose challenges to teaching and learning current software engineering concepts and skills. DevOps is particularly challenging because it covers technical concepts, such as pipeline automation, and non-technical ones, such as team roles and project management. The present study investigates a course setup to introduce these concepts to software engineering undergraduates. We designed the course by employing coding to associate DevOps concepts to Agile, Lean, and Open source practices and tools. We present the main asp…
DevOps and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are interconnected with each other. DevOps is a business-driven approach to providing quickly delivered quality software, and AI is the technology that can be used in the system to enhance its functionality. So, DevOps teams can use AI to test, code, release, monitor, and improve the system. Through AI, the automation process delivered by DevOps could be improved efficiently. This study aims to explore how AI can transform DevOps. The research is useful in terms of facilitating software developers and businesses to assess the importance of AI in DevOps. …
The growing demand for connected devices and the increase in investments in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector induce the growth of the market for this technology. IoT permeates all areas of life of an individual, from smartwatches to entire home assistants and solutions in different areas. The IoT concept is gradually increasing all over the globe. IoT projects induce an articulation of studies in software engineering to prepare the development and operation of software systems materialized in physical objects and structures interconnected with embedded software and hosted in clouds. IoT pro…
Over the last years, the software industry has adopted several DevOps technologies related to practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery. The high demand for DevOps practitioners requires non-trivial adjustments in traditional software engineering courses and educational methodologies. This work presents an interview study with 14 DevOps educators from different universities and countries, aiming to identify the main challenges and recommendations for DevOps teaching. Our study identified 83 challenges, 185 recommendations, and several association links and conflicts betw…
Adopting DevOps practices is nowadays a recurring task in the industry. DevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the friction between the software development (Dev) and the IT operations (Ops), resulting in higher quality software and a shorter development lifecycle. Even though many resources are talking about DevOps practices, they are often inconsistent with each other on the best DevOps practices. Furthermore, they lack the needed detail and structure for beginners to the DevOps field to quickly understand them. In order to tackle this issue, this paper proposes four foundational De…
DevOps is an emerging practice to be followed in Software Development life cycle. The name DevOps indicates that its an integration of Development and Operations team. It is followed to integrate the various stages of the development lifecycle. DevOps is an extended version of the existing Agile method. DevOps aims at Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Improvement, faster Feedback and Security. This paper reviews the building blocks of DevOps, challenges in adopting DevOps, models to improve DevOps practices and Future works on DevOps.
In the last decade, companies adopted DevOps as a fast path to deliver software products according to customer expectations, with well aligned teams and in continuous cycles. As a basic practice, DevOps relies on pipelines that simulate factory swim-lanes. The more automation in the pipeline, the shorter a lead time is supposed to be. However, applying DevOps is challenging, particularly for industrial control systems (ICS) that support critical infrastructures and that must obey to rigorous requirements from security regulations and standards. Current research on security compliant DevOps pre…
Software non-functional requirements address a multitude of objectives, expectations, and even liabilities that must be considered during development and operation. Typically, these non-functional requirements originate from different domains and their concrete scope, notion, and demarcation to functional requirements is often ambiguous. In this study we seek to categorize and analyze relevant work related to software engineering in a DevOps context in order to clarify the different focus areas, themes, and objectives underlying non-functional requirements and also to identify future research …
This research, undertaken in highly structured software-intensive organizations, outlines challenges associated to agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles adoption. The approach collected data via a series of thirty (30) interviews, with practitioners from the EMEA region (Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Georgia, Greece, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, UK), working in nine (9) different industry domains and ten (10) different countries. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles, which organizations choose to include in their DevOps adoption journeys wer…
Context: DevOps can be defined as a cultural movement to improve and accelerate the delivery of business value by making the collaboration between development and operations effective. Although this movement is relatively recent, there exist an intensive research around DevOps. However, the real reasons why companies move to DevOps and the results they expect to obtain have been paid little attention in real contexts. Objective: This paper aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand the context and the problems that many companies face day to day in their organizations when…
Context: DevOps can be defined as a cultural movement to improve and accelerate the delivery of business value by making the collaboration between development and operations effective. Objective: This paper aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps. Method: We conducted an exploratory study by leveraging in depth, semi-structured interviews to relevant stakeholders of 31 multinational software-intensive companies, together with industrial workshops and observations at organizations' facilities that …
Release management is one of the most important software processes and is a set of processes that includes the compilation, configuration, and management of software versions in different environments. In recent years, changes in processes, technologies, and tools and changes in practices and understanding have paved the way for more effective, efficient, sustainable, reusable models and methods in this field. The purpose of this study is to examine the DevOps idea to produce a flow, highlight their benefits, and investigate with a model how these philosophies, which are two of the most import…
Traditionally, promoted by the internet companies, continuous delivery is more and more appealing to industries which develop systems with safety-critical functions. Since safety-critical systems must meet regulatory requirements and require specific safety assessment processes in addition to the normal development steps, enabling continuous delivery of software in safety-critical systems requires the automation of the safety assessment process in the delivery pipeline. In this paper, we outline a continuous delivery pipeline for realizing continuous safety assessment in software-intensive saf…
System architecture diagrams play an essential role in understanding system architecture. They encourage more active discussion among participants and make it easier to recall system details. However, system architecture diagrams often diverge from the software. As a result, they can interfere with the understanding and maintenance of the software. We propose an approach to build system architecture diagrams using DevOps system descriptors to improve the consistency of architecture diagrams. To produce our approach, we survey problems with architecture diagrams in the software industry, develo…
Quality requirements typically differ among software features, e.g., due to different usage contexts of the features, different impacts of related quality deficiencies onto overall user satisfaction, or long-term plans of the developing organization. For instance, maintainability requirements might be particularly high for software features which are frequently used or bear strategic value for the developing organization. Also, software features where even the smallest delays are perceived as negative by the user will be subjected to specially tight performance requirements. We defined an oper…
Big data analytics (BDA) applications use machine learning algorithms to extract valuable insights from large, fast, and heterogeneous data sources. New software engineering challenges for BDA applications include ensuring performance levels of data-driven algorithms even in the presence of large data volume, velocity, and variety (3Vs). BDA software complexity frequently leads to delayed deployments, longer development cycles and challenging performance assessment. This paper proposes a Domain-Specific Model (DSM), and DevOps practices to design, deploy, and monitor performance metrics in BDA…
DevOps describes a method to reorganize the way different disciplines in software engineering work together to speed up software delivery. However, the introduction of DevOps-methods to organisations is a complex task. A successful introduction results in a set of structured process descriptions. Despite the structure, this process leaves margin for error: Especially security issues are addressed in individual stages, without consideration of the interdependence. Furthermore, applying DevOps-methods to distributed entities, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) is difficult as the architecture …
DevOps is a set of practices that deals with coordination between development and operation teams and ensures rapid and reliable new software releases that are essential in industry. DevOps education assumes the vital task of preparing new professionals in these practices using appropriate teaching methods. However, there are insufficient studies investigating teaching methods in DevOps. We performed an analysis based on interviews to identify teaching methods and their relationship with DevOps educational challenges. Our findings show that project-based learning and collaborative learning are…
DevOps (development and operations) aims to shorten the software development process and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. To get the potential gains of DevOps, the software development industry considering global software development (GSD) environment to hire skilled human resources and round-the-clock working hours. However, due to the lack of frequent communication and coordination in GSD, the planning and managing of the requirements change process becomes a challenging task. As in DevOps, requirements are not only shaped by development feedback but also by the operat…
Overcoming Challenges in Agile and DevOps Integration: A Qualitative Study
University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer（埃姆登/莱尔应用科学大学）；Auckland University of Technology（奥克兰理工大学）；University of Applied Sciences & Arts Hannover（汉诺威应用科学与艺术大学）
Background: Medical device development projects must follow proper directives and regulations to be able to market and sell the end-product in their respective territories. The regulations describe requirements that seem to be opposite to efficient software development and short time-to-market. As agile approaches, like DevOps, are becoming more and more popular in software industry, a discrepancy between these modern methods and traditional regulated development has been reported. Although examples of successful adoption in this context exist, the research is sparse. Aims: The objective of th…
Development, deployment and maintenance of networked software has been revolutionized by DevOps, which have become essential to boost system software quality and to enable agile evolution. Meanwhile the Internet of Things (IoT) connects more and more devices which are not covered by DevOps tools: low-power, microcontroller-based devices. In this paper, we contribute to bridge this gap by designing Femto-Containers, a new architecture which enables containerization, virtualization and secure deployment of software modules embedded on microcontrollers over low-power networks. As proof-of-concept…
The domain of cyber-physical systems (CPS) has recently seen strong growth, e.g., due to the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) in industrial domains, commonly referred to as "Industry 4.0". However, CPS challenges like the strong hardware focus can impact modern software development practices, especially in the context of modernizing legacy systems. While microservices and DevOps have been widely studied for enterprise applications, there is insufficient coverage for the CPS domain. Our goal is therefore to analyze the peculiarities of such systems regarding challenges and practices for usi…
DevOps responds the growing need of companies to streamline the software development process and, thus, has experienced widespread adoption in the past years. However, the successful adoption of DevOps requires companies to address significant cultural and organizational changes. Understanding the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps is key, and comprehending the existing theories and representations of team taxonomies is critical to guide companies in a more systematic and structured DevOps adoption process. As there was no unified theory to explain the differ…
Gamification is the use of game elements such as points, leaderboards, and badges in a non-game context to encourage a desired behavior from individuals interacting with an environment. Recently, gamification has found its way into software engineering contexts as a means to promote certain activities to practitioners. Previous studies investigated the use of gamification to promote the adoption of a variety of tools and practices, however, these studies were either performed in an educational environment or in small to medium-sized teams of developers in the industry. We performed a large-sca…
There is a gap in scientific information systems development concerning modern software engineering and scientific computing. Historically, software engineering methodologies have been perceived as an unwanted accidental complexity to computational scientists in their scientific systems development. More recent trends, like the end of Moore's law and the subsequent diversification of hardware platforms, combined with the increasing multidisciplinarity of science itself have exacerbated the problem because self-taught "end user developers" are not familiar with the disciplines needed to tackle …
