A Study of Adoption and Effects of DevOps Practices

Many organizations adopt DevOps practices and tools in order to break down silos within the organization, improve software quality and delivery, and increase customer satisfaction. However, the impact of the individual practices on the performance of the organization is not well known. In this paper, we collect evidence on the effects of DevOps practices and tools on organizational performance. In an extensive literature search we identified 14 DevOps practices, consisting of 47 subpractices. Based on these practices, we conducted a global survey to study their effects in practice, and measure DevOps maturity. Across 123 respondents, working in 11 different industries, we found that 13 of the 14 DevOps practices are adopted, determined by 50\% of the participants indicating that practices are `always', `most of the time', and 'about half of the time' applied. There is a positive correlation between the adoption of all practices and independently measured maturity. In particular, practices concerning sandboxes for minimum deployment, test-driven development, and trunk based development show the lowest correlations in our data. Effects of software delivery and organizational performance are mainly perceived positive. Yet, DevOps is also considered by some to have a negative impact such as respondents mentioning the predictability of product delivery has decreased and work is less fun. Concluding, our detailed overview of DevOps practices allows more targeted application of DevOps practices to obtain its positive effects while minimizing any negative effects.