| dc.description.abstract | This thesis describes a study conducted at Centric and concerns the adoption of DevOps in software product organization (SPOs), which are organizations that pro- duce software for multiple customers and thus need to take into account the wishes and needs from all these customers, while developing software. For these SPOs there is a need to constantly release faster to customers in order to preserve customer sat- isfaction in the form of being able to quickly release new features and provide bug fixes.
However, releasing software at a faster pace comes with the need to better align the concerns of stakeholders that reside in the chain of releasing software. In particular, development and operations need to be aligned as these parties traditionally have arranged their processes differently from one another and work in silos. However, in order to create a smooth and fast end-to-end flow when it comes to releasing software, DevOps provides a way to deal with the aforementioned and takes into consideration not only development and operations, but also other stakeholders such as quality assurance (Q/A), product management and information security.
When further observing DevOps, the phenomenon touches upon both cultural and technical matters to attain fast release of software, has a wide scope and could be seen as a movement, but is still young and not yet formally defined. Also, no adoption models or fine-grained maturity models showing what to consider to adopt DevOps and how to grow more DevOps mature were identified. As a consequence, this research attempted to fill these gaps and consequently brought forward six DevOps drivers and sixty three capabilities aiming to adopt DevOps to a mature extent. These sixty three capabilities form part of sixteen focus areas, which in turn belong to three perspectives. This combination of drivers, perspectives, focus areas and capabilities was used to construct a DevOps competence model showing the areas to be taken into account in the adoption of DevOps. Next to that, the perspectives, focus areas and capabilities were used to create a maturity model showing a fine grained path to be followed in order to reach a mature DevOps state.
In order to come to the artifacts described above, several data collection methods were leveraged, among which are semi-structured interviews at three different or- ganizations and a literature review. Other than that, two validation rounds were conducted of which the first round encompassed expert opinion sessions in which the DevOps competence model and the perspectives, focus areas and capabilities were validated. The second validation round entailed expert opinion sessions in which the focus areas, capabilities and the maturity model were validated. Finally, a case study was carried out with the final capabilities, which were processed in a self as- sessment that was sent out to nineteen assessees. Of these nineteen assessees, eight assessees filled in the self assessment, which ultimately ended up in seven useful filled in assessments for which maturity profiles could be made that showed the assessees the state of DevOps maturity and the next steps to be taken in order to grow more DevOps mature.
Even though initial results showed that the artifacts were found applicable, many opportunities for future research are still left including the gathering of a richer dataset, a more profound validation of the perspectives, focus areas, capabilities, DevOps competence model and maturity model and a wider case study that evalu- ates all capabilities to their fullest extent in different settings. Other future research could aim at situational factors and deeper scrutinization of the intertwinement of product management with DevOps. | |
