DevOps responds to the growing need of companies to streamline the software development process and thus has experienced widespread adoption in the past few years. However, the successful adoption of DevOps requires companies to address important cultural and organizational changes. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize that various DevOps taxonomies exist, both from academic and practitioner perspectives, which may lead to misleading or failed adoption of DevOps. This paper presents empirical research on the structure of DevOps teams in software-producing organizations. The goal is to better understand the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps by harmonizing the existing knowledge. To achieve this, we employed a grounded theory approach with collaborative coding, involving two research groups. Inter-Coder Agreement (ICA) was utilized to guide the discussion rounds. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of existing studies on DevOps teams and taxonomies to gain a deeper understanding of the subject. From the analysis, we built a substantive and analytic theory of DevOps taxonomies. The theory is substantive in that the scope of validity refers to the ten secondary studies processed and analytic in that it analyzes “what is” rather than explaining causality or attempting predictive generalizations. A public repository with all the data related to the products resulting from the analysis and generation of the theory is available. We built a theory on DevOps taxonomies and tested whether it harmonizes the existing taxonomies, i.e., whether our theory can instantiate the others. This is the first step to define which taxonomies are best suited to approach DevOps culture and practices according to the companies’ objectives and capabilities. Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

DevOps and continuous delivery have impacted the organizational structures of development and infrastructure groups in software-producing organizations. Our research aims at revealing the different options adopted by the software industry to organize such groups, understanding why different organizations adopt distinct structures, and discovering how organizations handle the drawbacks of each structure. We interviewed 68 carefully-selected IT professionals, 45 working in Brazil, 10 in the USA, 8 in Europe, 1 in Canada, and 4 in globally distributed teams. By analyzing these conversations through a Grounded Theory process, we identified conditions, causes, reasons to avoid, consequences, and contingencies related to each discovered structure (segregated departments, collaborative departments, API-mediated departments, and single department). In this way, we offer a theory to explain organizational structures for development and infrastructure professionals. This theory can support practitioners and researchers in comprehending and discussing the DevOps phenomenon and its related issues, and also provides valuable input to practitioners’ decision-making.

Summary Service choreographies support a distributed composition approach that is based on the specification of the external interaction of the participant services in terms of flows of message exchanges, given from a global perspective. When developing distributed service‐based applications, different services are produced by different teams; at the same time, such choreographies can also interact with third‐party services, hence leading to the reuse of black‐box services. Enforcing a global coordination logic across the many in‐house and third‐party services to correctly realize the specified choreography is a nontrivial endeavor. Automatic support is then desirable. In this article, we present an integrated development and run‐time environment for choreography‐based systems, which covers all the development activities, including specification, code synthesis, automatic deployment, enactment, and monitoring on the Cloud. We focus on providing a practical solution, that is, applicable by the community and considering technological standards used in the industry. We report the results of an experiment that we conducted with a use case in the in‐store marketing and sales domain. Results confirm confidence in the approach and show that the platform can be applied in practical contexts.

Context: To accelerate time-to-market and improve customer satisfaction, software-producing organizations have adopted continuous delivery practices, impacting the relations between development and infrastructure professionals. Yet, no substantial literature has substantially tackled how the software industry structures the organization of development and infrastructure teams. Objective: In this study, we investigate how software-producing organizations structure their development and infrastructure teams, specifically how is the division of labor among these groups and how they interact. Method: After brainstorming with 7 DevOps experts to better formulate our research and procedures, we collected and analyzed data from 37 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals, following Grounded Theory guidelines. Results: After a careful analysis, we identified four common organizational structures: (1) siloed departments, (2) classical DevOps, (3) cross-functional teams, and (4) platform teams. We also observed that some companies are transitioning between these structures. Conclusion: The main contribution of this study is a theory in the form of a taxonomy that organizes the found structures along with their properties. This theory could guide researchers and practitioners to think about how to better structure development and infrastructure professionals in software-producing organizations.

In recent years, service-oriented systems are becoming increasingly complex, with growing size and heterogeneity. Developing and deploying such large-scale systems present several challenges, such as reliability, reproducibility, handling failures on infrastructure, scaling deployment time as composition size grows, coordinating deployment among multiple organizations, dependency management, and supporting requirements of adaptable systems. However, many organizations still rely on manual deployment processes, which imposes difficulties in overcoming such challenges. In this paper, we propose a flexible and extensible middleware solution that addresses the challenges present in the large-scale deployment of service compositions. The CHOReOS Enactment Engine is a robust middleware infrastructure to automate the deployment of large-scale service compositions. We describe the middleware architecture and implementation and then present experimental results demonstrating the feasibility of our approach.