Why are many businesses instilling a DevOps culture into their organization?

TL;DR

This study explores why companies adopt DevOps by analyzing interviews with stakeholders, revealing common drivers, problems faced, and expected benefits, thus providing practical insights for organizations considering DevOps transformation.

Contribution

It offers an empirical understanding of the real-world motivations, challenges, and expected outcomes behind DevOps adoption through qualitative research and triangulation methods.

Findings

Identifies key problems prompting DevOps adoption

Highlights common expected benefits of DevOps

Reveals patterns and anti-patterns in DevOps implementation

Abstract

Context: DevOps can be defined as a cultural movement to improve and accelerate the delivery of business value by making the collaboration between development and operations effective. Although this movement is relatively recent, there exist an intensive research around DevOps. However, the real reasons why companies move to DevOps and the results they expect to obtain have been paid little attention in real contexts. Objective: This paper aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand the context and the problems that many companies face day to day in their organizations when they try to accelerate software delivery and the main drivers that move these companies to adopting DevOps. Method: We conducted an exploratory study by leveraging in depth, semi-structured interviews to relevant stakeholders of 30 multinational software-intensive companies, together industrial workshops and observations at organizations' facilities that supported triangulation. Additionally, we conducted an inter-coder agreement analysis, which is not usually addressed in qualitative studies in software engineering, to increase reliability and reduce authors bias of the drawn findings. Results: The research explores the problems and expected outcomes that moved companies to adopt DevOps and reveals a set of patterns and anti-patterns about the reasons why companies are instilling a DevOps culture. Conclusions: This study aims to strengthen evidence and support practitioners in making better informed about which problems trigger a DevOps transition and most common expected results.