From agile development to DevOps: Going towards faster releases at high quality - experiences from an industrial context

DevOps promises advantages, such as faster time-to-market or higher quality. A company transforming itself towards DevOps needs guidance in order to ask and answer relevant questions and not waste time and effort. We state four key issues that companies should discuss before they start introducing DevOps concepts. Furthermore, we report on a project conducted by Fujitsu Enabling Software Technology GmbH (Fujitsu EST) and Fraunhofer IESE where the introduction of DevOps for one product was accompanied for roughly one year. We present the concrete goals, the procedure, first results, as well as observations and lessons learned. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first contributions that describe practical experiences in introducing DevOps, without concealing that a lot of thinking, tailoring, and learning is still required to further improve DevOps in the environment.