Towards Sustainable DevOps: A Decision Making Framework

Abstract: In software industry, the DevOps is an increasingly adopting software development paradigm. Towards the sustainable DevOps adoption, there is a need to transform the organization Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing (CAMS) aspects concerning to core theme of continues development and operations. The software organizations face several complexities while implementing the DevOps principles. The sustainable DevOps implementation assist the software organizations to develop the quality projects with good return on investment. This evidence-based study aims to explore the guidelines of sustainable DevOps implementation, reported in literature and industry practices. Using systematic literature review and questionnaire survey, we identified the 48 guidelines for sustainable DevOps implementation. We further develop a decision-making framework aiming to assist the practitioners to consider the most significant set of guidelines on priority. The results show that out of CAMS, culture is the most important principle for sustainable DevOps implementation. Moreover, (i) enterprises should focus on building a collaborative culture with shared goals, (ii) assess your organization readiness to utilize a microservices architecture and (iii) educate executives at your company about the benefits of DevOps to gain resource and budget support are the highest priority guidelines for sustainable DevOps implementation. We believe that this in-depth study helps the practitioners to understand the core principles and guidelines for sustainable DevOps implementation.