Towards Practice and Principle Adoption through Continuous DevOps Leadership

Abstract

The contribution emphasizes research undertaken in highly structured software-intensive organisations and the transitional challenges associated to agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles adoption journeys. The approach undertaken to gain insights to research questions resulted in data collected, through a series of interviews, by thirty practitioners from EMEA region (Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Georgia, Greece, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, UK) working in nine different industry domains. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles that organisations are choosing to include in their adoption journeys towards DevOps-oriented structures is identified. The most frequently adopted practices of structured service management that can contribute to the success of DevOps practices adoption are also identified. Results indicate that software product development and operations roles in DevOps-oriented organisations can benefit from specific leadership styles.