Adopting DevOps in Agile: Challenges and Solutions

Background. DevOps is a hot topic in recent years. It emphasizes the combination of development and operation. Agile is one of the most popular development methods, but Agile mainly focused on software development part, there is no more involvement in deployment and operations. In this case, many companies consider adopting DevOps in Agile to attempt to improve the situation. Objectives. The combination of two different technologies is bound to produce some challenges, whether it is for practitioners or researchers, it is very important to find these challenges and mitigate them, so this article aims to investigate the challenges of adopting DevOps in Agile, then through the systematic literature review and survey questionnaire to determine the corresponding mitigation strategy. Then, in order to detail understand the process of adopting DevOps in Agile, we use interview to research the real process of adopting DevOps in agile. Methods. According to our research question, we used the systematic literature review(SLR), survey questionnaire and interview as our research methodology. Through literature review, we collected data of adopting DevOps in Agile, and summary the challenges and its relevant mitigation strategies. Then survey questionnaire helped us linking the content of literature to the industry, and compare their difference. Through the interview, we explored the actual process of adopting DevOps in Agile in industry, and correspond the challenges to the actual process. Results. Our study summarized the software development process of adopting DevOps based on Agile and revealed 23 challenges and corresponding mitigation strategies. The report also compares the commonalities and gaps between the results from the literature and the findings of real-life adopting of DevOps challenges and mitigation strategies. Conclusions. In this article, we introduced the challenges and corresponding mitigation strategies for adopting DevOps based on agile and summarize the corresponding software development process. The obvious challenges and mitigation strategies were divided into four categories: 1) People 2) Project 3) Process 4) Organization, after which we conducted further discussions based on the actual conditions and compared the results of systematic literature review and the results of questionnaire to detail explore their difference