A Vision of DevOps Requirements Change Management Standardization

TL;DR

This paper proposes a maturity model for managing requirements change in DevOps within global software development, addressing communication and coordination challenges to improve process effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces the DevOps-RCMIMM, a new maturity model tailored for GSD environments to enhance requirements change management in DevOps.

Findings

Initial results from a systematic literature review

Development of a preliminary DevOps-RCMIMM framework

Identification of key factors impacting change management

Abstract

DevOps (development and operations) aims to shorten the software development process and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. To get the potential gains of DevOps, the software development industry considering global software development (GSD) environment to hire skilled human resources and round-the-clock working hours. However, due to the lack of frequent communication and coordination in GSD, the planning and managing of the requirements change process becomes a challenging task. As in DevOps, requirements are not only shaped by development feedback but also by the operations team. This means requirements affect development, development affects operations and operations affect requirements. However, DevOps in GSD still faces many challenges in terms of requirement management. The purpose of this research project is to develop a DevOps requirement change management and implementation maturity model (DevOps-RCMIMM) that could assist the GSD organizations in modifying and improving their requirement management process in the DevOps process. The development of DevOps-RCMIMM will be based on the existing DevOps and RCM literature, industrial empirical study, and understanding of factors that could impact the implementation of the DevOps requirement change management process in the domain of GSD. This vision study presents the initial results of a systematic literature review that will contribute to the development of maturity levels of the proposed DevOps-RCMIMM.