DevOps Performance Engineering: A Quasi-Ethnographical Study

DevOps is a software engineering strategy to reduce soft- ware changes' rollout times by adopting any set of tactics that reduce friction in software lifecycles and their organisational variables, for example: coordination, communication, product evolution, deployment, operation, continuous architecting, continuous integration and more. Going DevOps is increasingly demanding that software engineering disciplines which were typically product-oriented such as software performance engineering to rethink their typical comfort zone, enlarging their scope from product, to process or even further to ecosystem and organisational levels of abstraction. This article makes an attempt at understanding what are the dimensions in DevOps organisational scenarios that can be addressed with a performance engineering lens. To do this, we performed a quasi-ethnographical study featuring a real-life industrial DevOps scenario. Discussing our results we conclude that many synergies exist between DevOps and performance engineering each with peculiarities, limitations and challenges - more research is needed to offer a full-spectrum performance-engineering support for DevOps practitioners.