Leading DevOps Practice and Principle Adoption

TL;DR

This study explores how highly structured organizations adopt DevOps practices, highlighting the importance of structured service management like ITIL for successful implementation across diverse regions and industries.

Contribution

It identifies key practices and principles adopted in DevOps journeys within structured organizations and emphasizes the role of structured service management in successful adoption.

Findings

ITIL and structured service management are frequently adopted.

Practitioners from diverse regions and industries share common DevOps adoption practices.

Structured approaches facilitate successful DevOps implementation.

Abstract

This research, undertaken in highly structured software-intensive organizations, outlines challenges associated to agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles adoption. The approach collected data via a series of thirty (30) interviews, with practitioners from the EMEA region (Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Georgia, Greece, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, UK), working in nine (9) different industry domains and ten (10) different countries. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles, which organizations choose to include in their DevOps adoption journeys were identified. The most frequently adopted structured service management practices, contributing to DevOps practice adoption success, indicate that those with software development and operation roles in DevOps-oriented organizations benefit from existence of highly structured service management approaches such as ITIL.