Towards a Theory on Architecting for Continuous Deployment

Context: As the adoption of continuous delivery practices increases in software organizations, different scenarios struggle to make it scales for their products in long-term evolution. This study looks at the concrete software architecture as a relevant factor for successfully achieving continuous delivery goals. Objective: This study aims to understand how the design of software architectures impacts the continuous deployment of their software product. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review to identify proper evidence regarding the research objective. We analyzed the selected sources adopting a synthesis and analysis approach based on Grounded Theory. Results: We selected 14 primary sources. Through our analysis process, we developed a theory that explains the phenomenon of Architecting for Continuous Deployment. The theory describes three other phenomena that support Architecting for Continuous Deployment: Supporting Operations, Continuous Evolution, and Improving Deployability. Furthermore, the theory comprises the following elements: contexts, actions and interactions, quality attributes, principles, and effects. We instantiated these elements and identified their interrelationships. The theory is supported by providing bi-directional traceability from the selected sources to the elements and vice-versa. Conclusions: Developing adequate architecture plays a crucial role in enabling continuous delivery. Supporting operations becomes vital to increase the deployability and monitorability of software architecture. These two outcomes require that developers accept responsibility for maintaining the operations. The continuous evolution of the architecture is essential, but it must consider balanced management of technical debt. Finally, improving deployability requires attention to the test strategy and how it affects downtime to enable efficient pipelines.

READ FULL TEXT
research
08/27/2018

An Empirical Study of Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Recently, many software organizations have been adopting Continuous Deli...
research
08/19/2020

The Organization of Software Teams in the Quest for Continuous Delivery: A Grounded Theory Approach

Context: Continuous delivery practices accelerate time to market and imp...
research
12/21/2018

Problems and Solutions of Continuous Deployment: A Systematic Review

Context: The software industry needs to adapt itself to a rapidly changi...
research
02/06/2020

Management of quality requirements in agile and rapid software development: A systematic mapping study

Context:Quality requirements (QRs) describe the desired quality of softw...
research
11/17/2022

A Study of Adoption and Effects of DevOps Practices

Many organizations adopt DevOps practices and tools in order to break do...
research
03/06/2022

Tool support for traceability management of software artefacts with DevOps practices

Software development process encompasses multiple types of and different...
research
01/16/2022

Zero Botnets: An Observe-Pursue-Counter Approach

Adversarial Internet robots (botnets) represent a growing threat to the ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset