An Empirical Taxonomy of DevOps in Practice

DevOps is described as a software engineering culture and philosophy that utilises cross-functional teams to build, test and release software faster and more reliably through automation. Research shows that its adoption speeds up software delivery time, improve quality, security, and collaboration in software development. One controversial issue has been whether DevOps is an organisation-wide culture or a job description. As DevOps is an emerging concept, its definitions and best practices are still hazy, making its implementation in practice less informed and somewhat risky. The rising trend of DevOps adoption among software development practitioners therefore heightens the need for in-depth investigation into its implementation.This paper seeks to contribute to the above by critically examining DevOps implementation in practice through an exploratory case study, based on interviews with 11 industry practitioners across nine organisations. Transcripts of interviews were coded and analysed using a method informed by Grounded Theory. This study provides an empirical taxonomy of DevOps implementation, describing developers' interaction with On-premises Ops, Outsourced Ops, DevOps teams, and DevOps bridge teams. We present a novel mapping of the approaches to on-premises and cloud-based deployments, and identified the facilitators of DevOps practices in the different modes. We further identified three distinct groups of activities in the fourth mode: provisioning and maintenance of physical systems, function virtualisation and creation of automated pipelines, and development, deployment and maintenance of applications, which may have given rise to the implementation of DevOps as bridge teams. Interviewees claimed these distinctions allowed developers to focus on delivering value for the business.