Industrial Views on DevOps Adoption Before and After Implementation: A Qualitative Comparison

DevOps is establishing itself as an important software development principle, pushing more organizations to adopt the trend for their projects. Several studies have investigated the benefits and challenges of DevOps adoption, but a comparison of practitioners who already use DevOps with those who are about to adopt is still missing. By comparing these two groups, we want to find possible differences in expectations for adopting DevOps and how planned adoption processes deviate from actual performed adoption processes. Moreover, seeing if the industrial assessments and understanding of DevOps change over time is interesting. To close this gap, we conducted interviews about DevOps adoption with nine representatives of five companies. Our study includes subjects who use DevOps and those who plan to do so soon. We compare their assessments with each other and with the literature. Among other things, we find a high agreement between expected and actual benefits (which are also consistent with those reported in the literature) but a potential underestimation of cultural difficulties among subjects who plan to adopt DevOps. Furthermore, we find that customer expectations and demands are decisive factors in why and how DevOps is used.