Adopting DevOps in the real world: A theory, a model, and a case study

DevOps is a set of practices and cultural values that aims to reduce the barriers between development and operations teams. Due to its increasing interest and imprecise definitions, existing research works have tried to characterize DevOps. Nevertheless, little is known about the practitioners’ understandingabout successful paths for DevOps adoption. Therefore, our goal is to detail real scenarios of DevOps adoption, presenting a theory, a model, and a case study. We used classic Grounded Theory to build a theory about 15 scenarios of successful DevOps adoption in companies from different domains and countries. We proposed a model (i.e., a workflow for DevOps adoption) and evaluated it through a case study at a Brazilian Government institution. We used a focus group to collect the company perceptions about DevOps adoption. This paper increments the existing view of DevOps by detailing real scenarios and explaining the role of each category during DevOps adoption. We provide evidence that collaboration is the core DevOps concern, contrasting with an existing wisdom that automation and tooling can be enough to achieve DevOps. Altogether, our results contribute to: generating an adequate understanding of DevOps, from the practitioners’ perspective; and assisting other institutions in the path towards DevOps adoption.