Exploring Peopleware in Continuous Delivery

ABSTRACT

Traditionally, releasing new software has been a fragile and painful procedure. This view has been challenged by a new approach to software deployment, where the goal is to always be able to deploy the system. The transition from manual releases to instant deployments requires a high degree of automation. Furthermore, the transition requires a new mindset, where both developers and operators act together to deliver value to end users. As this process involves humans and cooperation, developers and their attitude towards the new way of working is important. To this end, in this paper we study the developer perspective of applying continuous delivery in the light of interviewing practitioners working for projects where continuous delivery practices are applied. More precisely, we place the focus on how continuous delivery practices affect software developers and what are the prerequisites for achieving continuous delivery. Based on our research, higher quality and other benefits of continuous delivery can be achieved by giving developers more responsibility. Still, the added responsibilities do not necessarily increase stress, but can actually decrease it, and at the same time improve motivation and job satisfaction.

References

1. M. Fowler, "Continuous delivery," http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ContinuousDelivery.html, retrieved: November 2014.
2. C. G. Andrew, "The peopleware paradigm." Hospital materiel management quarterly, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 47--60, 1996.
3. T. DeMarco and T. Lister, Peopleware: productive projects and teams. Addison-Wesley, 2013.
4. P. Debois, "Devops: A software revolution in the making," Cutter IT Journal, vol. 24, no. 8, 2011.
5. P. Kärpänoja, "Continuous delivery in customer driven software project," Master's thesis, Tampere University of Technology, December 2015.
6. W. Hummer, F. Rosenberg, F. Oliveira, and T. Eilam, "Testing idempotence for infrastructure as code," in Middleware 2013. Springer, 2013, pp. 368--388.
7. L. Bass, I. Weber, and L. Zhu, DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2015.
8. S. Beecham, N. Baddoo, T. Hall, H. Robinson, and H. Sharp, "Motivation in software engineering: A systematic literature review," Information and software technology, vol. 50, no. 9, pp. 860--878, 2008.
9. F. Fagerholm and J. Münch, "Developer experience: Concept and definition," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software and System Process, ser. ICSSP '12. Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE Press, 2012, pp. 73--77. {Online}. Available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2664360.2664372
10. H. H. Olsson, H. Alahyari, and J. Bosch, "Climbing the "stairway to heaven" - a mulitiple-case study exploring barriers in the transition from agile development towards continuous deployment of software." in EUROMICRO-SEAA, V. Cortellessa, H. Muccini, and O. Demirörs, Eds. IEEE Computer Society, 2012, pp. 392--399. {Online}. Available: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/euromicro/euromicro2012.html#OlssonAB12
11. S. Neely and S. Stolt, "Continuous Delivery? Easy! Just Change Everything (Well, Maybe It Is Not That Easy)." in AGILE. IEEE Computer Society, 2013, pp. 121--128. {Online}. Available: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/agiledc/agiledc2013.html#NeelyS13
12. L. Chen, "Continuous delivery: Huge benefits, but challenges too," Software, IEEE, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 50--54, 2015.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • Development frameworks and environments