An Introduction to the DevOps Tool Related Challenges

Introduction : DevOps bridges the gap between the development and operations by improving the collaboration while automating the as many as steps from developing the software to releasing the product to the customers. To automate the software development activities, DevOps relies on the tools. There are many challenges associated with the tool implementation such as choosing the suitable tools and integrating tools with existed tools and practices. There must be a clear understanding on what kind of tools are used by the DevOps practitioners and what challenges does each tool create for them. Objectives: The main aim of our study is to investigate the challenges faced by the DevOps practitioners related to the tools and compare the findings with the related literature. Our contributions are (i) a comprehensive set of tools used by Developers and Operators in the software industries; (ii) challenges related to tools faced by the practitioners; and (iii) suggested recommendations and its effectiveness to mitigate the above challenges. Methods: we adopted case study for our study to achieve our research objectives. We have chosen literature review and semi-structured interviews as our data collection methods. Results: In our study we identified seven tools used by developers and operators which were not reported in the literature such as Intellij, Neo4j, and Postman. We identified tool related challenges from the practitioners such as difficulty in choosing the suitable tools, lack of maturity in tools such as Git, and learning new tools. We also identified recommendations for addressing tool related challenges such as Tech-Talks and seminars using complementary tools to overcome the limitations of other tools. We also identified benefits related to the adoption of such recommendations. Conclusion: We expect the DevOps tool landscape to change as old tools either become more sophisticated or outdated and new tools are being developed to better support DevOps and more easily integrate with deployment pipeline. With regard to tool related challenges literature review as well as interviews show that there is a lack of knowledge on how to select appropriate tools and the time it takes to learn the DevOps practices are common challenges. Regarding suggested recommendations, the most feasible one appears to be seminars and knowledge sharing events which educate practitioners how to use better tools and how to possible identify suitable tools