Understanding the Context of IoT Software Systems in DevOps

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews how DevOps principles are applied to IoT software systems, highlighting benefits, challenges, tools, and development pipelines to support efficient IoT software engineering.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of DevOps in IoT, identifying key concepts, tools, and practices, and discusses benefits and challenges based on existing literature.

Findings

Identified key benefits of DevOps in IoT systems.

Highlighted main challenges faced in IoT DevOps adoption.

Proposed a typical development pipeline for IoT software.

Abstract

The growing demand for connected devices and the increase in investments in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector induce the growth of the market for this technology. IoT permeates all areas of life of an individual, from smartwatches to entire home assistants and solutions in different areas. The IoT concept is gradually increasing all over the globe. IoT projects induce an articulation of studies in software engineering to prepare the development and operation of software systems materialized in physical objects and structures interconnected with embedded software and hosted in clouds. IoT projects have boundaries between development and operation stages. This study search for evidence in scientific literature to support these boundaries through Development and Operations (DevOps) principles. We rely on a Systematic Literature Review to investigate the relations of DevOps in IoT software systems. As a result, we identify concepts, characterize the benefits and challenges in the context of knowledge previously reported in primary studies in the literature. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) discussion of benefits and challenges for DevOps in IoT software systems, (ii) identification of tools, concepts, and programming languages used, and, (iii) perceived pipeline for this kind of software development.