Characterizing DevOps by Hearing Multiple Voices

Abstract

Recently, DevOps has emerged as an alternative for software organizations inserted into a dynamic market to handle daily software demands. As claimed, it intends to make the software development and operations teams to work collaboratively. However, it is hard to observe a shared understanding of DevOps, what potentially hinders the discussions in the literature and can confound observations when conducting empirical studies. Therefore, we performed a Multivocal Literature Review aiming at characterizing DevOps in multiple perspectives, including data sources from technical and gray literature. Grounded Theory procedures were used to rigorous analyze the collected data. It allowed us to achieve a grounded definition for DevOps, as well as to identify its recurrent principles, practices, required skills, potential benefits, challenges and what motivates the organizations to adopt it. Finally, we understand the DevOps movement has identified relevant issues in the state-of-the-practice. However, we advocate for the scientific investigations concerning the potential benefits and drawbacks as a consequence of adopting the suggested principles and practices.