Identifying and prioritizing key success factors for scaling DevOps methods in distributed software development environment using analytical hierarchy process

초록

Software companies are increasingly adopting distributed software development in conjunction with DevOps practices to improve collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery, ultimately accelerating the delivery of high quality products. However, in distributed and global software development, socio-cultural, geographical, and temporal boundaries hinder the seamless execution of DevOps practices. This study aims to identify and prioritize key success factors for implementing DevOps in such contexts. The research work was structured in three phases. First, a systematic literature review was conducted, resulting in the identification of 12 success factors. These were categorized through expert consultation into four groups based on maturity levels: Foundational DevOps Engineering, Proficient DevOps Engineering, Expert DevOps Engineering, and Full-Stack DevOps Engineering. To gather data for validation of the identified success factors, an online questionnaire survey was carried out in the second phase. Lastly, the factors and their categories were ranked according to their relative significance using the Analytical Hierarchy Process approach. Foundational DevOps Engineering emerged as the most significant category in the results. The most critical individual factors for scaling DevOps include: "executive support for DevOps endeavors", "maintaining continuous monitoring and evaluation to ensure high-quality production", "providing efficient training and continuous learning support to improve team members' skills" and "Integrating security into the organization's culture". These prioritized factors and categories form a decision-support framework that provides strategic guidance for scaling DevOps practices within the distributed software development setting.

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