DevOps critical success factors and organizational practices

Abstract

Over recent years, the software industry has observed a significant shift that allows software companies to deploy new features within much shorter release cycles than traditional longer timelines. This change has reduced release cycles to hours and minutes. Companies have employed various strategies to facilitate this transition to shorter release cycles, with the adoption of the DevOps approach being particularly prominent. DevOps emphasizes the collaboration between software development and operations, impacting the company culture, processes, products, associated technologies, and organizational frameworks used in software development and operations. The diverse paths available to implement DevOps have presented software companies with substantial challenges in adopting the approach. The primary objective of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the adoption and implementation of DevOps in software development. This includes identifying the critical success factors that impact DevOps practices, concepts, organizational practices, benefits, challenges, risk mitigation strategies, and recommendations. The research methodology involved a systematic literature review, semi-structured interviews, and open-ended survey questions among software practitioners, ultimately leading to a consolidated body of knowledge on DevOps.

A significant finding of the research is that the success of DevOps practices is influenced by three main factors: organizational, technical, social and cultural success factors. Additionally, an automated software deployment mechanism within the DevOps approach is crucial for quickly and consistently releasing software changes and managing operational infrastructure automatically. DevOps practices are commonly used by software companies that leverage cloud computing technology, but these new changes and adoption pose challenges within the software systems domain. Therefore, this research contributes through interviews and survey analysis, representing DevOps professionals’ perspectives in addressing various DevOps success factors and implementation issues and providing solutions that align with organizations’ software development practices.