Devops’ shift-left in practice: An industrial case of application

Abstract

DevOps aims at unifying software development and operations to improve products and deliver value to customers. However, many organizations adopt DevOps mainly from a traditional perspective, that is, going forward from development to operations. In this paper we present a case of study that illustrates how Carvajal Technology and Services, a software development organization, improved the design of a family of its software products by exploiting operations data. This case of application constitutes a first incursion of the organization into DevOps, exemplifying how the community and companies in industry can also go backwards from operations to development and design, thus realizing the DevOps shift-left concept. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) the analysis of the industrial DevOps application, for which the deployment automation mechanism is crucial to realize the shift-left concept effectively; and (ii) Amelia, the DSL we developed for deploying the different (re)designs to put into operation and gather feedback data rapidly. To evaluate the approach, the organization analyzed this incursion in both directions: from development to operations, on the benefits of deployment automation; and from operations back to development, by improving the throughput of the original design by a factor of five.