Abstract
DevOps was introduced around 2009 to bring the software development and IT operations teams to work together to deliver high-quality and stable software more quickly to meet market demands. DevOps brings speed and stability to software delivery by improving the four key metrics: lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and time to restore services.
The use of software products to achieve business outcomes is increasing as demand for reliable and quality services increases. Business outcomes differ from business to business, but common business outcomes are profitability, customer satisfaction, productivity, and quality. DevOps enables organizations to meet market demands and changing environments through much faster delivery of high-quality and stable software features. The success of DevOps depends on how an organization adopts and practises DevOps. Over the years, the adoption of DevOps has increased, as approaches and models are proposed to smooth the adoption process. However, these approaches and models focus more on software delivery outcomes and less on business outcomes.
The motivation for this study is the lack of DevOps adoption approaches and maturity models focusing on achieving business outcomes. There is a need to focus on achieving business outcomes when adopting DevOps. Therefore, this qualitative study aims to accelerate the adoption of DevOps, focusing on achieving business outcomes by focusing on aligning DevOps with business outcomes.
The literature review provides a list of DevOps elements and common challenges in the adoption of DevOps that impact software delivery and correlates DevOps with business outcomes through the four key metrics. The background provided by the literature review is used to design and draft a semi-structured interview guide to explore the adoption of DevOps further to achieve business outcomes. The study adopted the research onion concept to design the research methodology for exploring answers to the problem statement. The study is based on a qualitative approach derived from an interpretive paradigm to allow in-depth analysis of DevOps adoption, focusing on business outcomes.
There is no evidence that DevOps negatively affects business outcomes. The study cannot disprove the theoretical assumption that improving the four key metrics through DevOps implies better software delivery outcomes and organizational performance, contributing to business outcomes. DevOps is an important contributor to achieving business outcomes, but does not solely contribute to business outcomes. The misalignment between DevOps objectives and business strategy is one of the significant reasons why DevOps can fail to contribute to business outcomes, and recommendations have been proposed. Specifically, a conceptual DevOps adoption process has been proposed to accelerate the adoption of DevOps to meet market demands and to contribute to achieving business outcomes.
Keywords: DevOps, DevOps technical practices, DevOps approach, the business outcomes-centred DevOps adoption process.