A software architecture framework for quality-aware DevOps

Abstract

DevOps is an emerging software engineering strategy entailing the joined efforts of development and operations people, their concerns and best practices with the purpose of realising a coherent working group for increased software development and operations speed. To allow software architecture practitioners to enrich and properly elaborate their architecture specifications in a manner which is consistent with DevOps, we surveyed a number of DevOps stakeholders. We studied concerns and challenges to be tackled with respect to preparing a software architecture which is DevOps-ready, i.e., described in all details needed to enact DevOps scenarios. Subsequently, we introduce SQUID, that stands for Specification Quality In DevOps. SQUID is a software architecture framework that supports the model-based documentation of software architectures and their quality properties in DevOps scenarios with the goal of providing DevOps-ready software architecture descriptions. We illustrate our framework in a case-study in the Big Data domain.