DevOps Challenges in Organizations: Through Professional Lens

Abstract

DevOps is a set of organizational practices as well as a culture which tries to eliminate the barriers between the Devs and Ops teams, improve the collaboration and communication among teammates. DevOps is used in different organizations because it supports quicker production, stability and reliability for software development. While the success factors of DevOps adoption have been studied in the extant literature, also the perceived challenges that a company faces during the adoption are crucial to discover. This paper explores and highlights these challenges through an open ended survey (N = 15) and in-depth interviews with DevOps professionals (N = 16). According to the findings, there are various challenges while implementing DevOps in the organizations. The research suggests that (i) lack of team coordination, (ii) risky change and development, (iii) team members expertise level, (iv) lack of focus or differences in development, (v) test and production environment, (vi) poorly defined functional and technical requirements, (vii) poor integration and test process, (viii) pipeline execution problems, (ix) tools integration challenges, (x) people challenges and silo-ed thinking, (xi) debugging challenges due to remote execution, (xii) feature release challenges, (xiii) integrating new standards, (xiv) challenges with clients, (xv) knowledge sharing, (xvi) responsibility distribution issues are the challenges while using DevOps. The founded list of perceived challenges will help future research to suggest mitigation and risk management strategies for successful use of DevOps.