DevOps Environment Research Articles

Traceability Establishment and Visualization of Software Artefacts in DevOps Practice: A Survey

DevOps based software process has become popular with the vision of an effective collaboration between the development and operations teams that continuously integrates the frequent changes. Traceability manages the artefact consistency during a software process. This paper explores the trace-link creation and visualization between software artefacts, existing tool support, quality aspects and the applicability in a DevOps environment. As the novelty of this study, we identify the challenges that limit the traceability considerations in DevOps and suggest research directions. Our methodology consists of concept identification, state-of-practice exploration and analytical review. Despite the existing related work, there is a lack of tool support for the traceability management between heterogeneous artefacts in software development with DevOps practices. Although many existing studies have low industrial relevance, a few proprietary traceability tools have shown a high relevance. The lack of evidence of the related applications indicates the need for a generalized traceability approach. Accordingly, we conclude that the software artefact traceability is maturing and applying collaboratively in the software process. This can be extended to explore features such as artefact change impact analysis, change propagation, continuous integration to improve software development in DevOps environments.

Self-Service Cybersecurity Monitoring as Enabler for DevSecOps

Current IoT systems are highly distributed systems that integrate cloud , edge , and fog computing approaches depending on where intelligence and processing capabilities are allocated. This distribution and heterogeneity make development and deployment pipelines very complex and fragmented with multiple delivery endpoints above hardware. This fact prevents rapid development and makes the operation and monitoring of production systems a difficult and tedious task, including cybersecurity event monitoring. The DevSecOps can be defined as a cultural approach to improve and accelerate the delivery of business value by making dev/sec/ops teams’ collaboration effective. This paper focuses on self-service cybersecurity monitoring as an enabler to introduce security practices in a DevOps environment. To that end, we have defined and formalized an activity that supports ‘ Fast and Continuous Feedback from Ops to Dev ’ by providing a flexible monitoring infrastructure so that teams can configure their monitoring and alerting services according to their criteria ( you build, you run, and now you monitor ) to obtain fast and continuous feedback from the operation and thus, better anticipate problems when a production deployment is performed. This activity has been formalized using the Software & Systems Process Engineering Metamodel by OMG and its instantiation is described through a case study that shows the versioned and repeatable configuration of a cybersecurity monitoring infrastructure ( Monitoring as Code ) through virtualization and containerization technology. This self-service monitoring/alerting allows breaking silos between dev, ops, and sec teams by opening access to key security metrics, which enables a sharing culture and continuous improvement.

Towards a full-stack devops environment (platform-as-a-service) for cloud-hosted applications

If every programmer of cloud-hosted apps possessed exceptional technical capability and endless patience, the DevOps environment (also known as Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS) would perhaps become irrelevant. However, the reality is almost always the opposite case. Hence, IT engineers dream of a reliable and usable DevOps environment that can substantially facilitate their developments and simplify their operations. Current DevOps environments include Google App Engine, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, and so forth. In other words, PaaS bridges the gap between vivid IT engineers and stiff cloud systems. In this paper, we comprehensively examine state-of-the-art PaaS solutions across various tiers of the cloud-computing DevOps stack. On this basis, we identify areas of consensus and diversity in their philosophies and methodologies. In addition, we explore cutting-edge solutions towards realizing a more fine-grained, full-stack DevOps environment. From this paper, readers are expected to quickly grasp the essence, current status, and future prospects of PaaS.

The Factors Driving Testing in DevOps Setting- A Systematic Literature Survey

Objectives: Software testing is no more “Essential” requirement but it is “Critical” for the software application or product survival. It has become mental discipline and the tone of an organization mindset especially in the context of emerging DevOps practice. A few limitations of agile methodology from operational and business readiness perspective are addressed in DevOps. DevOps got emerged out of continuous software delivery which captures the market opportunities and reduces the feedback time. However, the new DevOps processes are influencing profoundly on QA and Testing functions. The present study is to understand different motivational factors driving testing in DevOps Environment and attempts to identify key technical, cultural and managerial factors of testing in DevOps setting. Methods/Statistical Analysis: We conducted extensive literature survey on academic and industry reports in the context of DevOps testing. Finally we screened 29 most relevant articles out of 295 found among 5 major journal databases. Further we extended manual survey including whitepapers and industry reports. Findings: It is evident that most of the articles connected to DevOps testing got published after year 2011 and surged after 2014. This phenomenon shows the nascence of the research progress in this domain. We observed that DevOps in testing is closely associated with automation of test cases. In its advanced stage, it is attributed to auto generation of test cases through model driven frameworks. This has been stressed in more than 50% of review articles. More than 50% of articles connected to cloud, virtualization, simulation techniques of DevOps Testing. The factors like agility, scale, metric driven process, reduction of complexity and cost appeared in more than 16 review articles. DevOps demands alternative metrics for better collaboration and communication between various stakeholders of the system. DevOps testing is face of organization culture and human resource mindset. This has been stressed in most of the review articles. Application/Improvements: This research is constrained from couple of biases (authority and publication). Research valued opinions of the other researchers. The search string used (DevOps Testing) may have multiple synonyms but we de-risked this threat by manually verifying each and every result. Further we extended manual survey using this search string.