A Qualitative Study of Architectural Design Issues in DevOps
Mojtaba Shahin, Ali Rezaei Nasab, Muhammad Ali Babar
备注：
Preprint accepted for publication in Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 2021. 38 Pages, 6 Tables, 11 Figures. This article is an extended version of the ICSSP2020 paper (the preprint is available at arXiv:2003.06108). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2003.06108
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 this end, we conducted a mixed-methods study that consists of a qualitative case study of two teams in a company during their DevOps transformation and a content analysis of Stack Overflow and DevOps Stack Exchange posts to understand architectural design issues in DevOps. Our study found eight specific and contextual architectural design issues faced by the two teams and classified architectural design issues discussed in Stack Overflow and DevOps Stack Exchange into 11 groups. Our aggregated results reveal that the main characteristics of DevOps-driven architectures are: being loosely coupled and prioritizing deployability, testability, supportability, and modifiability over other quality attributes. Finally, we discuss some concrete implications for research and practice.
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…
Context: Several companies are migrating their information systems into the Cloud. Microservices and DevOps are two of the most common adopted technologies. However, there is still a lack of understanding how to adopt a microservice-based architectural style and which tools and technique to use in a continuous architecting pipeline. Objective: We aim at characterizing the different microservice architectural style principles and patterns in order to map existing tools and techniques adopted in the context of DevOps. Methodology: We conducted a Systematic Mapping Study identifying the goal and …
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）
Purpose: Microservice Architecture (MSA) denotes an increasingly popular architectural style in which business capabilities are wrapped into autonomously developable and deployable software components called microservices. Microservice applications are developed by multiple DevOps teams each owning one or more services. In this article, we explore the state of how DevOps teams in small and medium-sized organizations (SMOs) cope with MSA and how they can be supported. Methods: We show through a secondary analysis of an exploratory interview study comprising six cases, that the organizational an…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
A software architect uses quality requirements to design the architecture of a system. However, it is essential to ensure that the system's final architectural design achieves the standard quality requirements. The existing architectural evaluation frameworks require basic skills and experience for practical usage, which novice software architects lack. We propose a framework that enables novice software architects to infer the system's quality requirements and tactics using the software architectural block-line diagram. The framework takes an image as input, extracts various components and co…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Siemens Technology（西门子科技）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
Over the last years, software development in domains with high security demands transitioned from traditional methodologies to uniting modern approaches from software development and operations (DevOps). Key principles of DevOps gained more importance and are now applied to security aspects of software development, resulting in the automation of security-enhancing activities. In particular, it is common practice to use automated security testing tools that generate reports after inspecting a software artifact from multiple perspectives. However, this raises the challenge of generating duplicat…
Microservice Architecture (MSA) is a service-based architectural style with a strong emphasis on high cohesion and loose coupling. It is commonly regarded as a descendant of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and thus might draw on existing findings of SOA research. This paper presents a metamodel for Model-driven Development (MDD) of MSA, which is deduced from existing SOA modeling approaches, but also incorporates MSA-specific modeling concepts. It is divided into the three viewpoints Data, Service and Operation, each of which encapsulates concepts related to a certain aspect of MSA. The me…
In recent years, microservice architecture has become a popular architectural style in software engineering, with its natural support for DevOps and continuous delivery, as well as its scalability and extensibility, which drive industry practitioners to migrate to microservice architecture. However, there are many challenges in adopting a microservice architecture, the most important of which is how to properly decomposition a monolithic system into microservices. Currently, microservice decomposition decisions for monolithic systems rely on subjective human experience, which is a costly, time…
Architectural debt is a form of technical debt that derives from the gap between the architectural design of the system as it "should be" compared to "as it is". We measured architecture debt in two ways: 1) in terms of system-wide coupling measures, and 2) in terms of the number and severity of architectural flaws. In recent work it was shown that the amount of architectural debt has a huge impact on software maintainability and evolution. Consequently, detecting and reducing the debt is expected to make software more amenable to change. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of a healthc…
Data-driven models (DDM) based on machine learning and other AI techniques play an important role in the perception of increasingly autonomous systems. Due to the merely implicit definition of their behavior mainly based on the data used for training, DDM outputs are subject to uncertainty. This poses a challenge with respect to the realization of safety-critical perception tasks by means of DDMs. A promising approach to tackling this challenge is to estimate the uncertainty in the current situation during operation and adapt the system behavior accordingly. In previous work, we focused on run…
Context: Stack Overflow (SO) has won the intention from software engineers (e.g., architects) to learn, practice, and utilize development knowledge, such as Architectural Knowledge (AK). But little is known about AK communicated in SO, which is a type of high-level but important knowledge in development. Objective: This study aims to investigate the AK in SO posts in terms of their categories and characteristics as well as their usefulness from the point of view of SO users. Method: We conducted an exploratory study by qualitatively analyzing a statistically representative sample of 968 Archit…
Unique developmental and operational characteristics of ML components as well as their inherent uncertainty demand robust engineering principles are used to ensure their quality. We aim to determine how software systems can be (re-) architected to enable robust integration of ML components. Towards this goal, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study consisting of (i) a systematic literature review to identify the challenges and their solutions in software architecture for ML, (ii) semi-structured interviews with practitioners to qualitatively complement the initial findings and (iii) a sur…
The architectural design of software systems is not a trivial task, requiring sometimes large experience and knowledge accumulated for years. Reference architectures have been increasingly adopted as a means to support such task, also contributing to the standardization and evolution of these systems. Although considerable time and effort are devoted to design these architectures, an outdated description is still found in several of them and, as a consequence, resulting in their non-continuation. This article presents guidelines to evolve the description of reference architectures, considering…
