A study of how DevOps can be adopted in offshore projects

Background: Organizations want to reach shorter development cycles to stay competitive, meanwhile, many organization wants to globalize their business to obtain benefits like reduced cost, get hold of specific talent or gain global presence. Typically in software development projects, there is a gap between development and operation resulting in a longer development cycle due to inferior communication and collaboration. DevOps is a framework that intends to reduce this gap with the purpose to reach shorter development cycles. However, currently, there is a lack of literature covering whether it is possible to adopt DevOps and keeping an offshore strategy. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to increase understanding about the use of DevOps in offshore projects. This increased understanding will be the start of filling the current gap in the literature about DevOps in distributed setups and form a basis for future research. The study aims to suggest how DevOps framework can bridge the gap between development and operation in offshore projects. Method: An exploratory case study was conducted and three different offshore projects, who had adopted DevOps, were investigated. In this study, 15 members from different projects were interviewed to find out how DevOps had been adopted in their projects. Based on a survey, a Social Network Analysis was conducted for each project with the purpose to identify communication patterns between members. Results: The result of this study provided information, specific to each project, about the setup, DevOps definition, and goal, DevOps practices as well as benefits and challenges with DevOps. Furthermore, the result presented information related to the performance of the project and, information about the collaboration, communication, and trust within the project. Conclusion: This study presented four possible distribution possibilities of DevOps in an offshore project and suggested different ways to manage the work roles when adopting DevOps. The study indicates that DevOps can be adopted in an offshore project in order to decrease the gap between development and operation by considering three perspectives; roles and responsibility, automated workflow and DevOps practices, and knowledge sharing Delimitations: This study is limited to only investigate projects from one company. Furthermore, the scope of this study does not include any economic aspects.