Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

TL;DR

This report summarizes a seminar that brought together researchers from software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing to foster collaboration on performance-aware DevOps practices and challenges.

Contribution

It identifies the need for cross-community collaboration and sets a path for long-term research partnerships in performance-aware DevOps.

Findings

Highlighting the importance of performance monitoring in DevOps

Encouraging interdisciplinary research collaborations

Addressing challenges in performance anomaly detection

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations.