A Model-Driven Digital Twin for the Systematic Improvement of DevOps Pipelines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model-driven Digital Twin for CI/CD pipelines using BPMN, enabling structured analysis, visualization, and systematic evolution of complex DevOps processes.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture leveraging BPMN for transforming raw CI configurations into structured models for better analysis and evolution.

Findings

Validated with open-source CI/CD projects

Supports visual abstraction and failure tracing

Enables systematic version comparison

Abstract

CI/CD pipelines are central to DevOps practices, yet their growing complexity makes them increasingly difficult to interpret, analyze, and systematically evolve. Existing tooling primarily offers execution logs and static graph representations, providing limited support for structured analysis of pipeline behavior, failures, and version-to-version evolution. This paper presents a model-driven Digital Twin (DT) for CI/CD pipelines that leverages BPMN as a model-ing backbone to transform raw CI configurations into structured, higher-level process representations. The proposed DT architecture enables visual abstraction of pipeline structure, failure tracing, and systematic version comparison, supporting both monitoring and evolution analysis of DevOps processes. Building upon validated DT architectural principles and prior work on build optimization and anomaly detection, the framework provides a modular, extensible foundation for integrating advanced analytical and prescriptive services into software delivery processes. The approach is validated using open-source CI/CD projects, and ongoing work targets the integration of additional improvement services and the extension of the DT to broader DevOps lifecycle processes.