Extending the Agile Development Discipline to Deployment: The Need For a Holistic Approach

Abstract

In the last decade information system development has made a shift towards the agile way of working. Agile teams are responsible for realizing requirements in a multidisciplinary set up, where business and development are represented in a single project. DevOps is a new movement to improve IT service delivery agility. DevOps fosters closer collaboration and communication between development and operations personnel. Until recently, operational issues and requirements remained underexposed in the project, which affected the quality of the software. DevOps aims to break down the functional silos and extends the scope of the project to the release deployment. In this thesis we propose an incremental method engineering approach to identify suitable process patterns for a Dutch IT organization, and be able to implement them into Scrum. The resulting method increments are sequentially implemented during an 8-week pilot project to demonstrate the effectiveness of DevOps practices on the experienced problem areas.