Lucy Ellen Lwakatare, Terhi Kilamo, Teemu Karvonen, Tanja Sauvola, Ville Heikkilä,

Juha Itkonen, Pasi Kuvaja, Tommi Mikkonen, Markku Oivo, Casper Lassenius,
DevOps in practice: A multiple case study of five companies,
Information and Software Technology,
Volume 114,
2019,
Pages 217-230,
ISSN 0950-5849,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2019.06.010.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950584917302793)
Abstract: Context: DevOps is considered important in the ability to frequently and
reliably update a system in operational state. DevOps presumes cross-functional
collaboration and automation between software development and operations. DevOps
adoption and implementation in companies is non-trivial due to required changes in
technical, organisational and cultural aspects. Objectives: This exploratory study
presents detailed descriptions of how DevOps is implemented in practice. The
context of our empirical investigation is web application and service development
in small and medium sized companies. Method: A multiple-case study was conducted in
five different development contexts with successful DevOps implementations since
its benefits, such as quick releases and minimum deployment errors, were achieved.
Data was mainly collected through interviews with 26 practitioners and observations
made at the companies. Data was analysed by first coding each case individually
using a set of predefined themes and thereafter perform a cross-case synthesis.
Results: Our analysis yielded some of the following results: (i) software
development team attaining ownership and responsibility to deploy software changes
in production is crucial in DevOps. (ii) toolchain usage and support in deployment
pipeline activities accelerates the delivery of software changes, bug fixes and
handling of production incidents. (ii) the delivery speed to production is affected
by context factors, such as manual approvals by the product owner (iii) steep
learning curve for new skills is experienced by both software developers and
operations staff, who also have to cope with working under pressure. Conclusion:
Our findings contributes to the overall understanding of DevOps concept, practices
and its perceived impacts, particularly in small and medium sized companies. We
discuss two practical implications of the results.
Keywords: DevOps; Continuous deployment; Agile; Operations; Development