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In this paper we describe the selection of a modern build automation tool for an industry research partner of ours, namely an insurance company. Build automation has become increasingly important over the years. Today, build automation became one of the central concepts in topics such as cloud native development based on microservices and DevOps. Since more and more products for build automation have entered the market and existing tools have changed their functional scope, there is nowadays a large number of tools on the market that differ greatly in their functional scope. Based on requirements from our partner company, a build server analysis was conducted. This paper presents our analysis requirements, a detailed look at one of the examined tools and a summarized comparison of two tools.

Over the past few decades, the substantial growth in enterprise-data availability and the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have allowed companies to solve real-world problems using Machine Learning (ML). ML Operations (MLOps) represents an effective strategy for bringing ML models from academic resources to useful tools for solving problems in the corporate world. The current literature on MLOps is still mostly disconnected and sporadic. In this work, we review the existing scientific literature and we propose a taxonomy for clustering research papers on MLOps. In addition, we present methodologies and operations aimed at defining an ML pipeline to simplify the release of ML applications in the industry. The pipeline is based on ten steps: business problem understanding, data acquisition, ML methodology, ML training & testing, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous training, continuous monitoring, explainability, and sustainability. The scientific and business interest and the impact of MLOps have grown significantly over the past years: the definition of a clear and standardized methodology for conducting MLOps projects is the main contribution of this paper.

With the advent of DevOps and its success stories, many large firms in the regulatory sector have begun to study more streamlined software deployment strategies. Traceability and change management is vital in these regulated organizations to keep track of when, why, and what was supplied to the production environment at what time. This thesis intends to provide a technique for one of the major banks in Sweden to deploy software using Azure DevOps pipelines while employing tracing and approving a deployment in an on-premises change management system. Since direct communication between the change management system and Azure DevOps is not possible, the decision was made to create an on-premises RFC handler and use Azure storage account queues to facilitate communication between pipelines searching for deployment grants and the on-premises change management system. To determine what value the RFC handler could provide the organization, interviews were conducted with several change management experts at the bank. One of the most notable conclusions from the interviews was that the RFC handler would likely reduce deployment time relative the old workflow. Med tillkomsten av DevOps och dess framgångshistorier har många stora företag inom regleringssektorn börjat studera mer strömlinjeformade programvarudistributionsstrategier. Spårbarhet och förändringshantering är avgörande i dessa reglerade organisationer för att förklara när, varför och vad som levererades till produktionsmiljön vid vilken tidpunkt. Detta examensarbete avser att tillhandahålla en teknik för en av de stora bankerna i Sverige att distribuera programvara med hjälp av Azure DevOps-pipelines samtidigt som man använder spårning och godkännande av en driftsättning i ett lokalt förändringshanteringssystem. Eftersom direkt kommunikation mellan ändringshanteringssystemet och Azure DevOps inte är möjlig, togs beslutet att skapa RFC handler och använda Azure Storage-kontoköer för att underlätta kommunikationen mellan pipelines som söker efter driftsättningsgodkännande och den lokala förändringshanteringen. För att avgöra vilket värde RFC handler skulle ge organisationen, genomfördes intervjuer med flera experter på förändringshantering inom banken. En av de viktigaste slutsatserna från intervjuerna var att RFC handler kommer att minska driftsättningstiden jämfört med tidigare arbetsflöde.

MLOps is becoming a widespread practice in modern machine learning and data science. The word ”MLOps” combines machine learning technology and business operation process. Many business companies are applying machine learning techniques to improve their business targets and increase their profits. However, machine learning tasks involve complex applications and many technical stakeholders to perform a single system. It is not easy for non-technical operation staff to understand and proceed with the data science and machine learning processes without the aid of technical stakeholders. The communication effort between different stakeholders costs highly since the entire machine learning and operation processes are redundant and complicated. Therefore, MLOps provides insight for businesses to simplify the system workflow. MLOps pipeline automation simplified the processes in data, model, and production perspectives. This project researches several kinds of literature to identify the process of MLOps, including the phases and processes of MLOps, the necessary components for pipeline automation, and the concept of continuous integration and continuous delivery with the aid of MLOps. Also, two methods were selected to introduce a general MLOps pipeline design and implementation and the software tools and technologies selected in each MLOps process. Finally, a comparison section was provided to evaluate different software tools and technologies in five standard criteria. MLOps är på väg att bli en utbredd praxis inom modern maskininlärning och datavetenskap. Ordet ”MLOps” kombinerar maskininlärningsteknik (machine learning technology) och affärsprocess (business operation process). Många företag tillämpar maskininlärningstekniker för att förbättra sina affärsmål och öka sin vinst. Maskininlärningsuppgifter involverar dock komplexa applikationer och många tekniska intressenter. Det är inte lätt för icke-teknisk driftpersonal att förstå och gå vidare med datavetenskaps- och maskininlärningsprocesser utan hjälp av tekniska intressenter. Kommunikationsarbetet mellan olika intressenter är dyrt eftersom maskininlärnings- och driftprocesserna är repetitiva och komplicerade. MLOps förser företag med insikter som förenklar systemets arbetsflöde. Pipelineautomation med MLOps har förenklat processerna ur data-, modell- och produktionsperspektiv. Detta projekt undersöker flera typer av litteratur för att identifiera processen som MLOps tillämpar, inklusive faserna och processerna för MLOps, de nödvändiga komponenterna för pipeline automation samt konceptet kontinuerlig integration och kontinuerlig leverans med hjälp av MLOps. Dessutom valdes två metoder ut för att introducera en allmän MLOps-pipelinedesign och - implementation samt de mjukvaruverktyg och teknologier som valdes i varje MLOps-process. Slutligen tillhandahölls ett jämförelseavsnitt för att utvärdera olika mjukvaruverktyg och teknologier utifrån fem standardkriterier.

The Eiffel Protocol provides traceability downstream and upstream of all activities that transpire inside the CI/CD pipeline. The traceability achieved by the Eiffel Protocol comes with great benefits even though it does not cover all development activities as it pertains only to the CI/CD pipeline. Our research aims to explore the idea of extending the Eiffel Protocol to cover all activities and discuss what benefits could be seen, especially in the scope of reducing the number of integration failures. A literature study was first carried out to find the root causes of these failures. After the literature study, we conducted a focus group session to gather data about the potential benefits and problems of an extension, what analyses could be drawn, and how it can affect integration errors. Our results show that an extension is beneficial as analyses that can be made with the generated data can tackle some of the biggest issues found in software development teams, especially in larger organizations. The complexity, cost involved and the time needed to see a return on investment does however weigh it down. Thus, while it is beneficial it is not enough for organizations to consider it as a priority to integrate with their environments when thinking of the costs involved to do so. Further implementation solutions need to be researched before it shows its worth.

All collected data on any physical, technical or economical process is subject to uncertainty. By incorporating this uncertainty in the model and propagating it through the system, this data error can be controlled. This makes the predictions of the system more trustworthy and reliable. The multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) method has proven to be an effective uncertainty quantification tool, requiring little knowledge about the problem while being highly performant. In this doctoral thesis we analyse, implement, develop and apply the MLMC method to partial differential equations (PDEs) subject to high-dimensional random input data. We set up a unified framework based on the software M++ to approximate solutions to elliptic and hyperbolic PDEs with a large selection of finite element methods. We combine this setup with a new variant of the MLMC method. In particular, we propose a budgeted MLMC (BMLMC) method which is capable to optimally invest reserved computing resources in order to minimize the model error while exhausting a given computational budget. This is achieved by developing a new parallelism based on a single distributed data structure, employing ideas of the continuation MLMC method and utilizing dynamic programming techniques. The final method is theoretically motivated, analyzed, and numerically well-tested in an automated benchmarking workflow for highly challenging problems like the approximation of wave equations in randomized media.

DevOps has become a generally accepted practice for software projects in the last decade and approaches certain shortcomings of the agile software development and the steadily gaining popularity of cloud infrastructure. While it shifts more and more responsibilities towards software engineering teams, the prevailing opinion is to keep DevOps teams small to reduce the complexity of inter-team communication. In circumstances where products outgrow the performance capability of a single team, microservice architecture enables multiple DevOps teams to contribute to the same application and meet the increased requirements. Since DevOps teams operate typically self-sufficiently and more or less independently inside an organization, such large-scale DevOps environments are prone to knowledge-sharing barriers. Textual Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are one of the cornerstones of DevOps and enable key features like automation and infrastructure provisioning. Nonetheless, most commonly accepted DSLs in the context of DevOps are cumbersome and have a steep learning curve. Thus, they fall short of their potential to truly enable cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing, not only between development and operation, but to the whole organization. DevOps teams require tools and DSLs, that treat knowledge sharing and reuse as a first-class citizen, in order to operate sufficiently on a large scale. However, developing DSLs is still presumed as an expensive task which can easily offset the resulting benefits. This dissertation presents a lingualization strategy for addressing the challenge of knowledge sharing in large-scale DevOps. The basic idea is to provide custom-tailored Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) that target single phases of the DevOps lifecycle and ease the DevOps adoption for newly formed teams. The paradigm of Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) bridges the semantic gap between stakeholders by custom-tailored DSMLs and thus is a natural fit for knowledge sharing. Key to a successful practice of LDE is as a new class of stakeholders. In the context of large-scale DevOps, language development can be realized by so-called Meta DevOps teams. Those teams, which themselves practice DevOps internally, manage a centralized repository of small DSMLs and offer them as a service. DevOps teams act as the customers of the Meta DevOps teams and can request new features or complete new DSMLs and provide feedback to already existing DSMLs. The presented Rig modeling environment serves as an exemplary DSML that targets the purpose of Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD), one of the most important building blocks of DevOps. Rig comes with an associated code generator to fully-generate CI/CD workflows from graphical models. Those graphical models provide an executable documentation and assist knowledge-sharing between stakeholders. The fundamental modeling concepts of the lingualization strategy are evaluated against previously published requirements by Bordeleau et al. on a DevOps modeling framework in an industrial context. In addition to that, Rig is evaluated based on results of a workshop during the 6th International School on Tool-Based Rigorous Engineering of Software Systems. Both evaluations yield encouraging results and demonstrate the potential of the lingualization strategy to break down knowledge-sharing barriers in large-scale DevOps environments.

The characteristics of the test environment are of vital importance to its ability to support the organizations testing objectives. This paper seeks to address the need for a structured and reliable approach, which can be used by companies and other organizations to optimize their test environments in each individual case. The reported study included a series of interviews with 30 individuals, a series of focus groups with in total 31 individuals and a cross-company workshop with 30 participants from five large-scale companies, operating in different industry segments. The study resulted in a list of success factors, including not only characteristics and capabilities existing within a test environment (intrinsic success factors) but also properties not inherent to the test environment, but still vital for a successfully implemented test environment (extrinsic success factors). This distinction is important, as the root causes differ and as addressing them requires distinct approaches-not only of technology but also of organization, communication and collaboration. We find that successful implementations of test environments for large-scale software systems depend primarily on how they support the companys business strategy, test organization and product testability (extrinsic success factors). Based on this, test environments can then be optimized to improve test environment capabilities, usability and stability (intrinsic success factors). The list of intrinsic and extrinsic success factors was well received by all five companies included in the study, supporting that the intrinsic and extrinsic success factors for test environments can be applied to a large segment of the software industry.

Ensuring a production-ready state of the application under development is the imminent feature of the Continuous Delivery (CD) approach. In a blockchain network, nodes communicate and store data in a distributed manner. Each node executes the same business application but operates in a distinct execution environment. The literature lacks research focusing on continuous practices for blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Specifically, it lacks such works with support for both design and deployment. The author has proposed a solution that takes into account the continuous delivery of a business application to diverse deployment environments in the DLT network. As a result, two continuous delivery pipelines have been implemented using the Jenkins automation server. The first pipeline prepares a business application whereas the second one generates complete node deployment packages. As a result, the framework ensures the deployment package in the actual version of the business application with the node-specific up-to-date version of deployment configuration files. The Smart Contract Design Pattern has been used when building a business application. The modeling aspect of blockchain network installation has required using Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the UML Profile for Distributed Ledger Deployment. The refined model-to-code transformation generates deployment configurations for nodes. Both the business application and deployment configurations are stored in the GitHub repositories. For the sake of verification, tests have been conducted for the electricity consumption and supply management system designed for prosumers of renewable energy.

Zvezna integracija in dostava sta se pojavili kot posledica prizadevanja, da bi uporabnikom zagotovili kakovostno programsko opremo na hiter in kakovosten način. V tem diplomskem delu analiziramo in primerjamo najbolj razširjena orodja, ki se uporabljajo za zvezno integracijo in dostavo v okolju Kubernetes. Arhitektura mikrostoritev je danes najbolj razširjena praksa gradnje aplikacij. Aplikacijo se razdeli na manjše, bolj obvladljive storitve, ki se lahko razvijajo in vzdržujejo ločeno. Te se izvajajo v vsebnikih, ki se nameščajo v Kubernetes. V praktičnem delu smo razvili štiri cevovode zvezne integracije in dostave z uporabo orodij Jenkins X, GitLab CI/CD, Spinnaker in FluxCD. Continuous integration and delivery emerged as a result of efforts to provide users with quality software in a faster and quality manner. In this thesis, we analyze and compare the most widely used tools for continuous integration and delivery in Kubernetes. Microservice architecture is the most widely used application building practice today. It divides the application into smaller, more manageable services that can be developed and maintained separately. These are implemented in all Kubernetes deployments. In the practical part of this thesis, we developed four different continuous integration and delivery pipelines using the Jenkins X, GitLab CI/CD, Spinnaker and FluxCD.

There are situations when you need to accelerate the software development lifecycle. When the state of Kerala in India was devastated by severe flooding in 2018, we faced such a situation while we were building applications for managing rescue and relief operations during floods. We present a variant of DevOps called Rapid-DevOps to meet the need for accelerated release cycles while maintaining the required quality and stability. We describe the cost-benefit analysis to justify its use and the factors in our development process that enabled its successful adoption.

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia O presente documento descreve o trabalho realizado por Gabriel Pinheiro, no âmbito da unidade curricular Dissertação/Estágio em Engenharia de Software, com o título original “CI/CD Pipelines para arquiteturas baseadas em micro-serviços”, promovido e sob o acolhimento da empresa WIT Software S.A. De forma a conseguir adaptar a mudanças e ao crescimento de operações na indústria de desenvolvimento de aplicações e software, o objetivo do estágio consistiu na criação de uma plataforma que permitisse criar um padrão único dentro das equipas de desenvolvimento de software. Esta plataforma estabelece um padrão base para atuais e futuros projetos de desenvolvimento, sendo que permite que sejam feitos ajustes e adaptações ao seu funcionamento consoante o projeto que a mesma integrar. Esta adoção de serviços de automação procura criar uma mudança de cultura dentro da organização, de forma que haja uma sensibilidade diferente quando se aborda problemas relacionados com o processo que decorre nos bastidores da criação de software. Com o intuito de aprendizagem, o estágio iniciou-se com um estudo de conceitos essenciais ao entendimento do objetivo do projeto. Aqui, criou-se um alicerce sob o qual o restante trabalho se iria fundar, obtendo-se conhecimento relacionado com tecnologias cloud-native, arquiteturas baseadas em micro-serviços, culturas de automação, metodologias onde a automação é aplicada e a forma como é aplicada, e, por fim, a análise de informação da aplicação já em produção. Tendo conhecimento destes conceitos, estudou-se as melhores práticas associadas à criação de uma infraestrutura em cloud para uma aplicação baseadas em micro-serviços, à criação de uma pipeline CI/CD e como esta deveria ser adotada dentro de uma organização, mantendo o aproveitamento das vantagens de serviços cloud-native. A fase de estudo terminou com estudo e análise de possíveis soluções que permitem aplicar estas boas práticas num ambiente de produção. De modo a garantir um produto final que fosse ao encontro das espectativas da organização, foi feito um levantamento de requisitos e um planeamento do projeto de desenvolvimento, desde a fase de provisionamento de infraestrutura até às ferramentas disponibilizadas às equipas de operações, integrando a análise de métricas e mensagens comunicadas pela aplicação. Para além do planeamento do projeto, foi preparado uma representação gráfica da arquitetura das três facetas da pipeline. Isto é, da pipeline responsável por criar a infraestrutura, da pipeline responsável por entregar a aplicação ao seu ambiente de produção, e, por fim, a arquitetura necessária para garantir observabilidade da aplicação. A solução final deste estágio pretende realizar uma mudança de cultura na organização, começando pela adoção de uma infraestrutura cloud-native, onde o seu provisionamento é feito on-demand e taxado consoante o nível de utilização. Este processo permite criar componentes computacionais em meros minutos, ao invés de requerer vários dias para equipas de IT realizarem pedidos de vários colaboradores. A infraestrutura é copulada com uma pipeline CI/CD que estabelece uma ponte de ligação entre developers de software e a infraestrutura referida anteriormente. Esta pipeline permite automatizar tarefas de build, testes unitários e análise de código de forma recorrente e consistente, acelerando o processo de entrega de software aos seus utilizadores. Com este padrão estabelecido em todos os projetos e esta cultura a tornar-se intrínseca a todos as equipas de desenvolvimento, todos os stakeholders envolvidos têm algo a desfrutar desta alteração. This document looks to present the work carried out by Gabriel Pinheiro, within the context of the Dissertation/Internship in Software Engineering course. The original title of the Project is CI/CD Pipelines for Microservice-Based architectures, promoted and coordinated by WIT Software S.A.In an effort to adapt to changes and the rapid growth of operating within the software development industry, the goal of the internship consists in creating a framework which establishes a standard within software development teams. This framework creates the Foundation on which current and future projects will base themselves, allowing for customization and alterations where necessary to fit the different contexts. The adoption of this product begins the adoption process of a culture based on automation services, in order to create a different view when facing problems related to the back-stage process of software development.The internship began with a study of concepts that were considered essential for a better understanding of the project in itself. With this study, a cornerstone was formed on which the remainder of the internship’s work would be based on, obtaining in-depth knowledge into how cloud-native technologies operate, what a microservices architecture consists of, what are known automation-based development cultures and how they can be adopted, and, finally, how application observability can be obtained when in production and dealing with microservices. Once concluded, a further study was conducted into understanding which are the best practices associated with creating cloud-native infrastructures, along with the best practices required when creating a CI/CD pipeline, and its adoption into a new organization. This study concluded with establishing which the best suited solutions should be used to apply these practices within an organization. In order to guarantee a final product which met the expectations of the organization, a list of requirements was established with those responsible for the internship itself, along with a detailed planning of the development project, beginning with the phase of infrastructure provisioning, through to the tools made available to operations teams. Furthermore, a graphic representation was created in order to define the framework’s architecture.The final product of this internship looks to apply a change in the organization’s culture of software development, beginning with the adoption of a cloud-native infrastructure, which allows for on-demand usage, billed according to the level of use. This means of provisioning allows computational components to be created and made available in a matter of minutes, contrasting strongly to the traditional reality which would require several days for IT teams to give access to developers. The infrastructure is coupled with the CI/CD pipeline which a bridge between said infrastructure and software developers, a pipeline which automates build tasks, including automated tests, code analysis and dependency verification in a consistent and recurring manner, without the loss of software quality. With this foundation in place, along with the culture of automation becoming more intertwined with the development teams, all stakeholders involved with this process can reap its benefits.

A series of Development and Operations (DevOps) in the process of making the Narotama University Management Information System have not been implemented properly by previous developers. There are improvements or additional features of the Management Information System that are in accordance with the functionality and the increasing development needs that will be used by the academic community, so that the Management Information System developer has a little difficulty in integrating documents and distributing applications with different packages to the Production Server. In this study, a new system design is proposed by applying the practice of Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery as a document integration process and can simplify the application distribution process, as well as implementing the Docker Container Platform as an application container with different packages that can be run on production server together. The results of implementing the practice of Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery and the implementation of the Docker Container Platform are able to help integrate documents between developers and be able to release fixes and add features packaged in different containers automatically and periodically without long delays. which only takes an average of 17.9 seconds in the process of sending the application to the Production Server.

This article describes the analysis of the quality of microservice architectures, which are one of the main approaches to the creation and maintenance of modern information systems capable of quickly respond to changes in business demands. The implementation of continuous delivery of software components for dynamic business processes of information systems can be carried out by various sets of microservices, the optimal choice of which is a complex multi-alternative task. The paper presents a review of existing approaches to solving the problem, which showed that the development of models for assessing the quality of microservices of information systems requires further elaboration in terms of accounting for uncertainty in the initial data and modes of operation. The authors have proposed an approach to solving the problem of analyzing the quality of a microservice architecture which is implemented on the basis of a fuzzy production network model. The model allows for comprehensive accounting of various parameters (qualitative and quantitative). The article shows the implementation process of the fuzzy production network that was developed to analyze the functional quality of the microservice architecture for processing customer orders using fuzzy modeling software. The results of the analysis will allow managers and system architects to make an informed choice of the microservice architecture of the information system, as well as use it in their reports when arguing the need for scaling the system and increasing the availability of microservices.

The objective of this article is to develop a control mechanism that can suppress the ongoing transient instability in a power system through the continuous delivery of corrective actions. The continuous delivery of corrective actions basically refers to performing multiple adjustments in series until the transient instability is completely healed. The motivation behind the particular work arises from the observation that exercising the corrective action merely once may not always be sufficient to restore the stability of the system. In order to enable the continuous delivery of corrective actions, a macrolevel dynamic assessment approach is taken instead of the conventional and microlevel static coherency assessment. The macrolevel coherency assessment is to be carried out based upon real-time snapshots of system quantities for the on-spot identification of generator groups that have grossly lost synchronism with one another. A complete transient instability mitigation program is developed with due application of the macrocoherency assessment in delivering continuous corrective actions. In order to ensure almost instantaneous computation of coherent generator groups, a novel clustering algorithm is also developed. Corrective actions are delivered in the form of generator rejection and load curtailment. Extensive verification of the proposed methodology is carried out by means of real-time software-in-loop simulations.

Edge computing is a reality for the current IoT systems that need fast processing and quick response time to make real-time decisions and IoT systems without permanent connectivity to the cloud (e.g., car manufacturing, precision agriculture, or cattle raising). Additionally, these industries are facing the need for rapid and continuous innovation by accelerating the delivery of over-the-air (OTA) software updates in edge devices. DevOps promotes collaboration between development and operation teams and automation at all steps of software construction to achieve continuous delivery (CD) of business value. Although DevOps has demonstrated numerous successful cases in the Web domain, in the IoT domain and, more specifically, at the edge, there are few reported cases. This work presents a success case of CD of customized software as a service software as a service (SaaS) updates at the IoT Edge. This may enable new business models at the IoT Edge. This article presents an architectural model of a highly distributed (cloud and edge) IoT system and a CD process flow for customized SaaS applications in edge nodes. Both the architectural model and the CD process flow are instantiated in a case study for precision agriculture.

Software and systems modeling (2020). doi:10.1007/s10270-020-00828-z, Published by Springer, Berlin

The paper is about how the application is maintained and monitored using Azure CI pipeline. Maintaining and monitoring the quality of the software plays an important role in company’s growth and performance. This is achieved using DevOps. Few years back agile methodology was playing a major role in the industry, software were deployed in monthly, quarterly or annual basis, which is time consuming. However, now industries are moving towards DevOps methodology where in the software deployed multiple times a day. This methodology provides the organization to constantly and reliably add new features and automatically deploy them across various platforms or environment in order to gain high performance and quality assurance products. Continuous integration and Continuous delivery/ Continuous deployment are the pillars of DevOps. Continuous integration, Continuous delivery and Continuous deployment are the continuous software development practices of industry. By automating the build, test and deployment of software, CI/CD bridges the space between development and operation teams. This paper also concentrates on how the Test Driven Development features of .Net technologies supports the quality maintenance and monitoring of the application.

DevOps (development and operations) is a collaborative and multidisciplinary organizational effort to automate continuous delivery of a software project with an aim to improve software quality. The implementation of DevOps practices is not straightforward as there are several complexities associated with it. The aim of this study is to identify and prioritize the factors that positively influence the DevOps practices in software organizations. Using a systematic literature review, 19 factors were identified. The identified factors were further validated with experts via a questionnaire survey study. Finally, Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) was used to prioritize the identified success factors. The results indicate that “DevOps security pipeline,” “use system orchestration” and “attempt matrix organization and transparency” factors are the highest ranked success factors for the successful implementation of DevOps practices. The FAHP analysis is novel in this research area as it provides the prioritization based taxonomy of the identified factors which will assist the researchers and practitioners to focus on the critical areas that are significant for the successful adoption of DevOps practices.

DevOps is the form of software engineering practices for software used to have better collaboration among teams and help deliver the business product in a timely manner and meet the business requirements. The growing demands from the customers and the competition among similar products give rise to better principles in DevOps than ever before. There exists current trend in industry to adopt cloud based solutions as compared to other solutions. This gives rise to certain evolution in the way DevOps is done in industry. This main purpose of this paper is to address the changes in the way DevOps is carried in industry and the scope of it due to evolving industry needs and newer emerging tools. The paper is structured in to provide an introduction to modern DevOps and the necessity of adoption of DevOps, DevOps applied in SDLC phases, tool concerning DevOps, Evolution of DevOps in modern software development and conclusion.

Software pipelines enable organizations to chain applications for adding value to contents (e.g., confidentially, reliability, and integrity) before either sharing them with partners or sending them to the cloud. However, the pipeline components add overhead when processing large volumes of data, which can become critical in real-world scenarios. This paper presents a gearbox model for processing large volumes of data by using pipeline systems encapsulated into virtual containers. In this model, the gears represent applications, whereas gearboxes represent software pipelines. This model was implemented as a collaborative system that automatically performs Gear up (by using parallel patterns) and/or Gear down (by using in-memory storage) until all gears produce uniform data processing velocities. This model reduces delays and bottlenecks produced by the heterogeneous performance of applications included in software pipelines. The new container tool has been designed to encapsulate both the collaborative system and the software pipelines into a virtual container and deploy it on IT infrastructures. We conducted case studies to evaluate the performance of when processing medical images and PDF repositories. The incorporation of a capsule to a cloud storage service for pre-processing medical imagery was also studied. The experimental evaluation revealed the feasibility of applying the gearbox model to the deployment of software pipelines in real-world scenarios as it can significantly improve the end-user service experience when pre-processing large-scale data in comparison with state-of-the-art solutions such as Sacbe and Parsl. This work has been partially supported by the “Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad ” under the project grant TIN2016-79637-P “Towards Unification of HPC and Big Data paradigms”.

DevOps is a combination of practices and a company culture which aims minimize the barriers between the operation and development teams in the organization. As its adoption and use in the industry has been growing, different kinds of research are trying to explore DevOps practices, processes and implementations in the organizations. Most of the extant research conducted in the past was to investigate how DevOps worked, what impacts it made into the organizations and how the adoption of DevOps played a role for the overall success for companies. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of a dataset collected via an open ended survey from 15 software professionals who are experienced in DevOps. The focus of the study is on reporting DevOps practices in organizations, and how they impact on the success of DevOps. We discuss the DevOps professionals point-of-view on DevOps practices and align their thoughts through a DevOps model of the critical success factors. Publishers version

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Informatics Engineering, DevOps presents a mix of agile methodologies that allow an application’s release cycle to be shortened. This translates into a faster delivery of value to the stakeholders. However, the value creation chain does not finish at the end of that cycle. It is necessary to monitor the artifacts produced at a system level, and at the application level, in order to ensure the compliance of the functional and non functional requirements. Today, there seems to be a clear separation between the monitoring process and the application development process. As the development and operations processes have merged in DevOps, this dissertation pretends to investigate how to integrate several aspects of monitoring into the regular lifecycle of an application’s development. The inclusion of external services further emphasizes the need to include an observability component into an infrastructure. The main goal of this dissertation is to develop a solution for the deployment of an infrastructure using stateof- the-art technologies and frameworks, while also providing observability to the system and to the applications running on it. To do so, it required the investigation of the methodologies and concepts that are the base of the software development lifecycle, focusing on the latter stages of that process: the deployment, and monitoring phases. These methodologies and concepts were complemented with the study of state-of-the-art technologies and frameworks that aim to ease the burden of setting up an infrastructure quickly and with the necessary tools to evolve it after the initial setup and with each new software release. Furthermore, it also involved the research of tools that enable the collection of metrics from applications, as well as processing such data and displaying it in useful ways for operators and stakeholders. In this context, this dissertation aims to provide a solution for the deployment of MobileID applications at INESC TEC, using the Mobile Driving Licence as the primary case study. The proposed design and implementation with a container orchestration framework and CI/CD pipelines, enables faster development of different MobileID applications, while also providing continuous monitoring to the deployments. With this implementation, it was possible to assess how container orchestration frameworks provide greater flexibility to applications, and how this observability can be augmented with the use of dedicated monitoring systems., DevOps baseia-se na utilização de um conjunto de metolodogias ágeis que permitem encurtar o ciclo de desenvolvimento de uma aplicação de forma a que as alterações efetuadas pelos programadores se traduzam no valor desejado pelas partes interessadas. No entanto, a criação de valor não termina na parte final desse ciclo. É necessário monitorizar os artefactos produzidos tanto a nível de sistema, como a nível aplicacional, de forma a garantir o cumprimento de requisitos funcionais e não funcionais. Todavia, parece existir uma separação entre o processo de monitorização e o processo de desenvolvimento de aplicações. Tal como os processos de desenvolvimento e de operações se uniram no conceito de DevOps, pretende-se também investigar como será possível integrar vários aspetos de monitorização no ciclo normal de desenvolvimento de uma aplicação. O principal objetivo desta dissertação é desenvolver uma solução de operacionalização de infraestruturas de suporte a aplicações com recurso às tecnologias e ferramentas mais adequadas. Esta solução deverá ser acompanhada, em paralelo, por mecanismos de observabilidade dessa infraestrutura e das aplicações que nela são executadas. Para isso, foi necessária a investigação de metodologias e conceitos que formam a base do processo de desenvolvimento de software. O foco esteve nas partes finais do processo: a fase de deployment e a de monitorização. Estas metodolodogias e conceitos foram complementados com o estudo de tecnologias e ferramentas que pretendem facilitar o processo de montar uma infraestrutura rapidamente, bem como permitir a evolução da arquitetura inicial consoante os subsequentes lançamentos de aplicações. Para além disso, também envolveu a pesquisa de ferramentas que permitem extrair e armazenar métricas de aplicações, bem como processar essa informação e disponibilizá-la em formato útil quer para operadores, quer para outras partes interessadas. Neste contexto, esta dissertação pretende desenvolver uma solução que permita efetuar o deployment de aplicações de Identidade Digital no INESC TEC, utilizando a Carta de Condução Móvel como caso de estudo. A arquitetura proposta, e a respetiva implementação com recurso a um orquestrador de containers e pipelines de CI/CD, permite o desenvolvimento mais ágil de novas aplicações de Identidade Digital, e proporciona monitorização contínua a cada iteração do desenvolvimento. A partir do resultado prático obtido, foi possível aferir de que forma os orquestradores de containers permitem melhorar a observabilidade de aplicações, e de que forma ela pode ser aumentada com recurso a sistemas dedicados de monitorização contínua.

Мета дипломної роботи: оцінювання вразливостей, які виникають під час налаштувань систем CI/CD, та виділення рекомендацій, які дозволять їх уникнути. Об’єкт дослідження: виникнення загроз під час використання систем для безперервної інтеграції та безперервного розгортання програмного забезпечення. Предмет дослідження: вразливості в системах безперервної інтеграції та доставки програмного забезпечення. Наукова новизна отриманих результатів полягає в класифікації та визначенні причин виникнення вразливостей під час роботи з системами безперервної інтеграції та безперервної доставки, та формулюванні методів вдосконалення безпеки CI/CD систем. Практичне значення: Результати дослідження можуть бути використані DevOps інженерами під час налаштування екосистеми безперервної інтеграції, безперервної доставки, автоматичного розгортання та тестування програмного забезпечення. The purpose of the thesis: assessing vulnerabilities that arise during the configuration of CI / CD systems, and highlighting recommendations to avoid them. Object of research: the emergence of threats while using systems for continuous integration and continuous deployment of software. Subject of research: vulnerabilities in continuous software integration and delivery systems. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is the classification and determination of the causes of vulnerabilities while working with systems of continuous integration and continuous delivery, and the formulation of methods to improve the security of CI / CD systems. Practical significance: The results of the study can be used by DevOps engineers in setting up an ecosystem of continuous integration, continuous delivery, automatic deployment and software testing.

Context: Software companies must become better at delivering software to remain relevant in the market. Continuous integration and delivery practices promise to streamline software deliveries to end-users by implementing an automated software development and delivery pipeline. However, implementing or retrofitting an organization with such a pipeline is a substantial investment, while the reporting on benefits and their relevance in specific contexts/domains are vague. Aim: In this study, we explore continuous software engineering practices from an investment-benefit perspective. We identify what benefits can be attained by adopting continuous practices, what the associated investments and risks are, and analyze what parameters determine their relevance. Method: We perform a multiple case study to understand state-of-practice, organizational aims, and challenges in adopting continuous software engineering practices. We compare state-of-practice with state-of-the-art to validate the best practices and identify relevant gaps for further investigation. Results: We found that companies start the CI/CD adoption by automating and streamlining the internal development process with clear and immediate benefits. However, upgrading customers to continuous deliveries is a major obstacle due to existing agreements and customer push-back. Renegotiating existing agreements comes with a risk of losing customers and disrupting the whole organization. Conclusions: We conclude that the benefits of CI/CD are overstated in literature without considering the contextual and domain complexities rendering some benefits infeasible. We identify the need to understand the customer and organizational perspectives further and understand the contextual requirements towards the CI/CD.

When shortening release cycles and moving towards continuous delivery, a different approach for quality assurance may be needed than in traditional release management. To allow the transition, all stakeholders must retain a sense of confidence in the quality of release candidates. This thesis proposes a definition for confidence consisting of 30 confidence factors to take into account to ensure confidence from all stakeholders. Confidence factors have been found through interviews with 11 stakeholders, analyzed and categorized using grounded theory analysis. The found factors are grouped into two main categories: Process and Verification Results. The thesis additionally contains a literature review of quality measurements and explores how confidence can be expressed in a continuous delivery pipeline. It is found that it is not possible to comprehensively express confidence only with metrics displayable in a pipeline when including only currently well-researched metrics, but with the combination of processes known to be followed in the organization some metrics provide coverage for many of the confidence factors.

Heutzutage gewinnen DevOps-Techniken in der Softwareentwicklungsbranche immer mehr an Bedeutung. Die Entwickler wollen eine schnellere und zuverlässigere Bereitstellung ihrer Anwendungen erreichen. Das Schlüsselwort für dieses Ziel heißt DevOps-Praktiken. Continuous practices ermöglichen es Unternehmen, Software häufig und zuverlässig zu veröffentlichen. Automatisierung ist das, was jedes Unternehmen bei großen Projekten braucht, an denen Ingenieure gemeinsam arbeiten. Aufgrund des zunehmenden Interesses an DevOps-Techniken ist es unerlässlich, sowohl allgemeine Kenntnisse als auch Wissen über die Herausforderungen bei der Arbeit mit diesen Technologien zu erwerben. In diesem Beitrag werden der aktuelle Stand der Technik, die Funktionen und Vorteile von Technologien und Tools für Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery und Continuous Deployment einschließlich Software Configuration Tools vorgestellt. Architekturen, Vorteile und eine Schlussfolgerung des am besten geeigneten Konfigurationswerkzeugs für Basisanwendungen, die in einer beliebigen Programmiersprache geschrieben sind, werden in dieser Thesis vorgestellt. Diese Arbeit zielt auch darauf ab, Entwickler auf die Herausforderungen aufmerksam zu machen, die auf sie warten, und auf die Bereiche, in denen sie sich weiterentwickeln können. Es gibt zahlreiche Herausforderungen, die künftige Forschung zur Verbesserung von Continuous practices erfordern. Da kontinuierliche Praktiken zu einem wesentlichen Bereich des Software-Engineering geworden sind, sind außerordentliche Forschungen erforderlich, um die Arbeit mit DevOps-Techniken zu verbessern. Nowadays, DevOps techniques are becoming more and more important in the software development industry. Developers want to achieve faster and reliable deployment of their applications. The keyword for this goal is called DevOps practices. Continuous practices enable companies to frequently and reliably release software. Automation is what every company needs to handle in big projects where engineers are working collaboratively on. Due to increasing interest in DevOps techniques, it is essential to gain general knowledge as well as knowledge about challenges when working with these technologies. This paper presents the state of the art, features and benefits of technologies and tools for Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment including software configuration tools. Architectures, benefits and a conclusion of the best suited configuration tool for basic applications written in an arbitrary programming language is presented in this paper. This paper also aims to make developers aware of the challenges that await them and the areas in which they can develop further. There are numerous challenges, which require future research for improving continuous practices. Since continuous practices became an essential area of software engineering extraordinary researches are needed to improve work with DevOps techniques.

Changing a company's business model is one of the biggest challenges this can address. The transition from the world of consulting to the design and development of products must take place with firm and safe steps. In this context is where the target company is located and where this project is developed, consisting of the implementation of the DevOps culture in Movicoders S.L. This culture, its tools and methodologies have been identified as the most appropriate for this type of change and objectives. Some of the available options have been analyzed from the specific environment, defining a suitable technological stack for this task. The team members have been communicated and accompanied, enabling them to use Jira, Shell scripting, Jenkins, Docker, AWS and other tools as part of that stack. As support for change, the Rehaviva Crece project has been used, which has allowed team members to apply these new techniques and knowledge that they have acquired in the process. During which, agile techniques and methodologies have been applied, aligned with the DevOps principles that allow the continuous delivery of value. Finally, the results obtained have been evaluated, at a technical level and through customer feedback, delivery frequencies, satisfaction of the development and management team, with a positive result. El cambio de modelo de negocio de una empresa es uno de los mayores retos que esta puede abordar. La transición desde el mundo de la consultoría al diseño y desarrollo de productos debe darse con pasos firmes y seguros. En ese contexto es donde se encuentra la empresa objetivo y donde se desarrolla este proyecto, consistente en la implementación de la cultura DevOps en Movicoders S.L. Se ha identificado dicha cultura, sus herramientas y metodologías como la más adecuada para este tipo de cambios y objetivos. Se han analizado desde el entorno específico, algunas de las opciones disponibles, definiendo un stack tecnológico adecuado para esta tarea. Se ha comunicado y acompañado a los miembros del equipo, habilitándoles en el uso de las herramientas Jira, Shell scripting, Jenkins, Docker, AWS y otras como parte de ese stack. Como soporte al cambio, se ha utilizado el proyecto Rehaviva Crece, que ha permitido a los miembros del equipo aplicar esas nuevas técnicas y conocimientos que han adquirido en el proceso. Durante el cual, han aplicado técnicas y metodologías ágiles, alineadas con los principios DevOps que permiten la entrega de valor continuada. Finalmente, se han evaluado los resultados obtenidos, a nivel técnico y mediante feedback con el cliente, frecuencias de entrega, satisfacción del equipo de desarrollo y de Dirección, con un resultado positivo.

Die digitale Transformation fordert von vielen Unternehmen einen hohen Grad an Prozessautomatisierung, um wettbewerbsfähig zu bleiben. Zu diesen wichtigen Prozessen zählen, in der Softwareentwicklung, der Auslieferungs- und Bereitstellungsprozess. Die Automatisierung dieser Prozesse kann durch sogenannte CI/CD-Pipelines verwirklicht werden. Diese Bachelorarbeit befasst sich mit den Themen der kontinuierlichen Integration, kontinuierlichen Auslieferung und kontinuierlichen Bereitstellung, und wie diese durch eine CI/CD-Pipeline realisiert werden können. Das Ziel dabei war es die Akronyme CI und CD kritisch zu betrachten und zu bestimmen, die CI/CD Workflow Pipeline zu beschreiben und den DevOps Ansatz und die Werkzeuge die Azure DevOps zur Unterstützung dieses Ansatzes anbietet, vorzustellen. Im letzten Teil der Arbeit werden die Erstellung und Implementierung einer CI/CD-Pipeline mit Azure DevOps in eine bestehende Applikation genauer ausgeführt und Herausforderungen, welche bei der Umsetzung aufgetreten sind, aufgezeigt.CI und CD sind Akronyme, die in der Literatur für Softwareentwicklung sehr häufig auftreten aber nicht eindeutig definiert sind. Für diese Arbeit wird CI als Continuous Integration, CDE als Continuous Delivery und CD als Continuous Deployment definiert. Diese kontinuierlichen Methoden beschleunigen und verbessern die traditionellen Prozesse der Integration und Bereitstellung. Eine CI/CD-Pipeline dient dabei als Framework um diese Methoden umsetzen zu können. Zusätzlich ist CI/CD ein Teil des DevOps Softwareentwicklungsansatzes. Die Integration dieses Ansatzes kann durch die Verwendung der Azure DevOps Tools unterstützt werden. Die fünf Kernelemente, die der Azure Dienst anbietet, sind: Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Test Plans und Azure Artifacts. Für die Erstellung und Implementierung der CI/CD-Pipeline für diese Arbeit wurde Azure DevOps verwendet. Dabei wurde die Codebasis der verwendeten Applikation in Azure Repos importiert und als Grundlage für das Erstellen der CI/CD-Pipeline mit Azure Pipelines verwendet. Dadurch konnte eine vollständige Implementierung einer CI/CD Pipeline in eine bestehende Applikation durchgeführt werden. Obwohl die Umsetzung der CI/CD-Pipeline einige Herausforderungen mit sich gebracht hat, konnte dargelegt werden, dass es möglich ist, ein CI/CD-Pipeline mit Azure DevOps in eine bestehende Anwendung zu implementieren und dass die daraus resultierenden Vorteile den Aufwand belohnen. The digital transformation demands a high degree of process automation from many companies in order to remain competitive. These important processes include in software development the delivery and deployment process. The automation of these processes can be realised through so-called CI/CD pipelines.This bachelor thesis deals with the topics of continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment, and how these can be realised through a CI/CD pipeline. The goal was to critically examine and define the acronyms CI and CD, describe the CI/CD workflow pipeline, and introduce the DevOps approach and the tools Azure DevOps offers to support this approach. In the last part of the paper, the creation and implementation of a CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps in an existing application is described in more detail and challenges encountered during the implementation are highlighted.CI and CD are acronyms that appear frequently in the software development literature but are not clearly defined. For this work, CI is defined as Continuous Integration, CDE as Continuous Delivery and CD as Continuous Deployment. These continuous methods accelerate and improve the traditional processes of integration and deployment. A CI/CD pipeline serves as a framework to implement these methods. Additionally, CI/CD is part of the DevOps software development approach. The integration of this approach can be supported by using the Azure DevOps tools. The five core elements offered by the Azure service are: Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Test Plans and Azure Artifacts. Azure DevOps was used to create and implement the CI/CD pipeline for this work. The code base of the application used was imported into Azure Repos and used as the basis for creating the CI/CD pipeline with Azure Pipelines. This allowed for a full implementation of a CI/CD pipeline into an existing application. Although the implementation of the CI/CD pipeline presented some challenges, it was demonstrated that it is possible to implement a CI/CD pipeline into an existing application using Azure DevOps and that the resulting benefits reward the effort. Vrefasser: David Sebernegg Abweichender Titel laut Übersetzung der Verfasserin/des Verfassers Bachelorarbeit FH JOANNEUM 2022

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works., In the current mobile app development, novel and emerging DevOps practices (e.g., Continuous Delivery, Integration, and user feedback analysis) and tools are becoming more widespread. For instance, the integration of user feedback (provided in the form of user reviews) in the software release cycle represents a valuable asset for the maintenance and evolution of mobile apps. To fully make use of these assets, it is highly desirable for developers to establish semantic links between the user reviews and the software artefacts to be changed (e.g., source code and documentation), and thus to localize the potential files to change for addressing the user feedback. In this paper, we propose RISING (Reviews Integration via claSsification, clusterIng, and linkiNG), an automated approach to support the continuous integration of user feedback via classification, clustering, and linking of user reviews. RISING leverages domain-specific constraint information and semi-supervised learning to group user reviews into multiple fine-grained clusters concerning similar users' requests. Then, by combining the textual information from both commit messages and source code, it automatically localizes potential change files to accommodate the users' requests. Our empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline work in terms of clustering and localization accuracy, and thus produces more reliable results.

The software industry is regarded as one of the most creative and dynamic industries in the world. At the same time, sheltering software through copyright and patent law has been a major point of contention for the past 40 years. This doctoral thesis aims to provide new insights to this discussion. Through the use of sociological methodology, it supplies the necessary basic scientific research regarding how software is developed and commercialized nowadays. Based on these findings, it then legally evaluates to what extent copyright and patent law are able to reflect these structures and determines how an optimal protection scope for computer programs could look like today. This doctoral thesis on one hand offers novel insights and points of view on existing legal doctrines. It further acknowledges as well as legally qualifies some prevailing trends in the software industry, such as Scrum and continuous delivery, that have so far been largely unaddressed by copyright and patent law.

In order to adapt to the rapid iteration of business applications brought about by the construction of power grids, it is necessary to establish an information system DevOps system that adapts to the characteristics of the company, standardize R&D standards, and build an automated tool chain covering the entire process, shorten the cycle from R&D to production deployment, and deploy at high frequency Ensure the reliability, stability and safety of the production environment, and realize the automation, digitization and visualization of the whole process. From a business perspective, break through the barriers of business, development, testing, and operation and maintenance teams, realize the accurate transmission of information in each link, formulate unified research and development standards, establish continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment mechanisms to achieve the shortest time from demand to rapid Deliver product prototypes, then pass tests and collect user feedback, quickly iterate, and continuously revise products to meet business needs.

V diplomski nalogi so opisane razvojne prakse zvezne integracije, dostave in postavitve, ki skupaj sestavljajo cevovod CI/CD. Njihova glavna naloga je zagotavljanje kvalitete programske opreme z avtomatizacijo ponovljivih postopkov. V okviru diplomskega dela so predstavljena tri orodja, ki omogočajo implementacijo cevovoda CI/CD: Jenkins, GitLab in Travis CI. Vsa omenjena orodja so bila preizkušena v Amazonovem oblaku, kjer smo vzpostavili cevovod CI/CD z namenom analize. Glavni cilj diplomske naloge je bila identifikacija lastnosti orodij CI/CD in kriterijev, s katerimi smo definirali model vrednotenja. Lastnosti in kriteriji so bili pridobljeni s pregledom literature. Rezultat diplomskega dela je model vrednotenja orodij za vzpostavitev cevovoda CI/CD, ki je bil uporabljen na konkretnem primeru v sodelovanju s podjetjem in nudi podporo pri odločanju. The diploma thesis describes the development practices of continuous integration, delivery and deployment, which together make up the CI/CD pipeline. Their main task is to ensure the quality of software by automating repeatable processes. Within the diploma thesis, three tools are presented that enable the implementation of the CI/CD pipeline: Jenkins, GitLab and Travis CI. All the mentioned tools were tested in the Amazon cloud, where we set up a CI/CD pipeline, for the purpose of analysis. The main goal of the diploma thesis was to identify the properties of CI/CD tools and the criteria by which we defined the evaluation model. Properties and criteria were obtained by reviewing the literature. The result of the diploma thesis is a model of CI/CD tool evaluation, which was used in a specific case in cooperation with the company and offers decision support.

DevOps refers to a set of practices that integrate software development and operations with the primary aim to enable the continuous delivery of high-quality software. DevOps has also promoted several challenges to software engineering teaching. In this paper, we present a preliminary study that analyzes existing teaching strategies reported in the literature. Our findings indicate a set of approaches highlighting the use of environments to support teaching. Our work also investigates how these environments can contribute to address existing challenges and recommendations of DevOps teaching.

Although UML modeling has been used in the Brazilian industry in the last decade, little is known about the factors, perceptions of professionals and practices that end up affecting the UML use in real-world projects. This paper, therefore, reports on an exploratory survey focused on investigating how UML is used in practice in the Brazilian software industry. In total, 314 practitioners from 180 information technology companies answered an online questionnaire about the usage-affecting factors, difficulty and frequency of use, perceived benefits, and adoption-preventi ng contextual factors of UML models. Moreover, 20 practitioners participated in a semi-structured interview. The results show that the participants recognize the usefulness of the UML models, e.g., allowing an improved understanding of the integration among enterprise applications. However, 74.8% of the participants did not use UML models due to some factors such as continuous delivery practices, time constraints, lack of knowledge about modeling, company culture, and the ever-present difficulty of keeping the models updated and synchronized.

Purpose of the paper is using the energetic criterion for improving the efficiency of road transport of crop of cereals. The methodological basis of the study is a systematic approach to the study of issues of development and improving the efficiency of the transport process in agricultural production, by modeling and optimizing the required number of cars. The study was carried out by economic and mathematical modeling of the composition of the harvesting and transport complex. Methods of linear mathematical programming were used. It has been established that the optimization of the parameters of the transport process of harvesting and transporting crop of cereals it is an actual task. For the continuous delivery of the mowed cereals to the place of storage without interrupting technological operations, the total productivity of vehicles (cars or tractor carts) must correspond to the actual productivity of harvesting aggregates (forage harvesters). At the same time, the number of transport units for specific harvesting conditions should be optimal according to the criterion of minimum energy costs for transporting crop of cereals. To develop the optimization model, the following assumptions were made: the harvesting and transport group of the storage complex is a combination of the same type of forage harvesters and vehicles of the same carrying capacity; the cereals e is loaded into a vehicle moving next to the combine, and then delivered to the place of storage, at that time the combine is waiting for the vehicle to return; the duration of the working cycles of the combine and the vehicle are taken as constant and multiple values, that is, a deterministic model is used. The number of vehicles at which the specific energy costs during harvesting and transportation of green mass to the storage will be minimal will be optimal for the harvesting and transport complex under consideration. Optimization mathematical model has been developed for the transport service process of forage harvesters that takes into account the conditions of this process. The criterion for the effectiveness of the choice option is the specific energy costs when harvesting and transporting crop of cereals (the objective function of the mathematical model), provided that they are minimized. Factors that determine these costs are identified and calculated dependencies are developed for their determination. The comprehensive method of optimizing the technology for harvesting and transporting crop of cereals from farms growing crops with the participation of road transport was further developed.

Based on multiple series of interviews and workshops, this paper presents the MaLET model – a representation of the typical evolution path for companies who successfully adopt exploratory testing. The model provides a step-by-step approach to systematically improve exploratory testing over time, and shows how and why capabilities may regress. The MaLET model was validated through a series of interviews with 20 interviewees from eight case study companies in separate industry segments. The interviews also revealed examples on improvement initiatives that had failed in the companies, showing that improvement initiatives tend to fail if they are not planned in an order corresponding to the maturity levels in the model. The MaLET model was well received by the interviewees during the validation, describing the model as sound, relevant and useful in practice.

Continuous integration and delivery are well-established paradigms in the software development community. With these continuous practices come many challenges; while some of these challenges are immediate and well documented in literature, others may be revealed only after sustained application of these practices in large-scale and complex contexts. Based on researcher observations and interviews with 22 senior professionals from four companies, all with significant but varied experiences of continuous practices, we present a set of underreported challenges with continuous practices observed in multiple industry settings. Through a grounded theory approach we construct the Tapco model — Test Automation Progression in Continuous Practices — identifying two distinct ways in which companies progress towards continuous delivery, onto which the studied cases are mapped. This model is then validated by presenting it to the four studied companies, operating in disparate industry segments, and to three additional industry cases, letting them evaluate its relevancy, accuracy and novelty. We find that the model provides industry professionals with essential guidance on how to avoid common pitfalls, as well as an understanding of their causes and possible remediation.

Today, most Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) solutions use infrastructure as code to describe the pipeline-based build and deployment process. Each solution uses its own format to describe the CI/CD pipeline, which hinders the interoperability and the analysis of CI/CD pipelines. In this paper, we propose a model-driven DSL-based framework for CI/CD pipeline definition and analysis. It comprises (i) the analysis of the meta-model of the Jenkins pipeline definition language, (ii) the StalkCD domain-specific language providing a base for interoperability and transformation between different formats, and (iii) an extensible set of transformations between tool-specific CI/CD definitions and analysis tools. We demonstrate the specific support for Jenkins as a CI/CD tool and BPMN for exploiting analyses from the workflow domain and visualizing the results. We evaluate the DSL and the transformations empirically based on more than 1,000 publicly available Jenkinsfiles. The evaluation shows that our framework supports 70% of these files without information loss.

DevOps is a combination of collaborative and multidisciplinary efforts of an organization to control continuous delivery and updates of new software while guaranteeing their reliability and correctness. In the software industry, the implementation of DevOps (development and operations units) faces many challenges that are specifically associated with the security. The objective of this study is to identify and develop a prioritization based taxonomy of DevOps security challenges. The total of eighteen DevOps security challenges were extracted using systematic literature review approach and were further evaluated with experts using questionnaire survey study. Finally, the multi criteria decision making PROMETHEE-II approach was used to prioritize and develop the taxonomy of identified factors and their categories. The implications of PROMETHEE-II approach are novel in this research domain as it has been used successfully in various other domains e.g. medical, banking, internet techniques and management etc. The contribution of this study is not limited to develop the taxonomy based structure of DevOps security challenges, but also the proper prioritization of these challenges by introducing PROMETHEE-II approach in the research field of DevOps. The study results will assist the practitioners to remove the uncertainty and vagueness in the opinion of DevOps experts to secure DevOps implementation for better and continuous software development process.

The purpose of this paper was to capture an industry perspective on the current project and project management challenges. Based on four Business Roundtable meetings held in Melbourne over a year, concluding mid-2019, the paper attempts to distill the erudite insights of participants into contemporary business challenges and solutions. The predominant theme of the meetings was dealing with business change and its rate of the rollout. There has been a distinct industry shift in expectation replacing major business transformations with a new continuous delivery paradigm. There was an agreement regarding many of the adaptation measures needed to meet this new challenge.

Agile software development is successful due to self-organizing teams, adaptive planning, a cooperative environment with respect to communication with clients and team members, small development cycles, continuous design improvements, continuous delivery and feedback of clients. Cloud computing helps to reduce cost, enables scalability and enhances communication through its services. A generic framework with the conjunction of Agile Development and Cloud Computing (ADCC) proposed in an earlier study is evaluated in this study. The Malaysia Research and education network (MyRen) cloud is utilized to implement the framework. A case study is conducted to evaluate the framework. Before conducting the case study, the participants are educated on the ADCC framework. The results of the case study show that the performance of agile methods is improved with the usage of the ADCC framework. The improvement is measured in terms of local and distributed agile development environments.

In fire suppression, continuous delivery of water or foam to the fire source is essential. The present study concerns fire suppression in a ship under sea condition, by introducing reinforcement learning technique to aiming of fire extinguishing nozzle, which works in a ship compartment with six degrees of freedom movement by irregular waves. The physical modeling of the water jet and compartment motion was provided using Unity 3D engine. In the reinforcement learning, the change of the nozzle angle during the scenario was set as the action, while the reward is proportional to the ratio of the water particle delivered to the fire source area. The optimal control of nozzle aiming for continuous delivery of water jet could be derived. Various algorithms of reinforcement learning were tested to select the optimal one, the proximal policy optimization.

This Development of software release is the systematic process, planning, designing, and monitoring software through different phases and settings; testing and delivery of software releases included. Traditional models, such as incremental/ iterative and ad-hoc approaches, do not fulfill today's demanding customers or I.T. companies. New methods, such as agile software creation and the continuous implementation of DevOps, occur. The research problem for this study is to understand how development and operations automation leads to improving the strategies in release management and easing operations for the I.T. sector (Slack et al., 2018). DevOps and Agile are equally beneficial to faster implementation of working functions in development. Continuous Delivery and DevOps primarily seek to provide quicker and more frequent, more stable applications to meet consumer and company needs (Verona et al., 2016). This paper provides an overview of the development of software release management, from conventional methods to agile and product development via DevOps. This study demonstrates how automation in software release management advances the strategies in the I.T. sector and ease the operations both in time and in effect to meet information system’s needs. A review of the literature will be conducted to build a robust evidence-based study on the research problem. Based on what many scholars have found out in their various studies, there is a strong correlation between improved automation and the ease of operations in release management to meet the I.T. needs. This DevOps study aims to explore the benefits of automation advancement for I.T. stakeholders and operating teams to make it easier for emerging technologies to move from initiation to completion of its operations. On a small scale, the advancement of automation is improved by alternating between infrastructure and design. More organized methods, such as CD, are generally needed in large organizations. The most advanced breakthroughs to enhance the reliability of software development in large companies are usually the application of these concepts on a scale, and it should be the focus of any significant transformation (Kim et al., 2016). The software development life cycle and its release management are seen as a painstaking process, because the available resources and time in one software release may not generally meet all requirements. However, the method enables I.T., stakeholders, based on each release restriction, to reach sections of their operational needs for product releases. There are several obstacles to the planning and review process, making it one of the most common problems in software demand engineering.

DevOpsis a collaborative and multidisciplinary organizational effort to automate continuous delivery of new software updates while guaranteeing their correctness and reliability. The present survey investigates and discusses DevOps challenges from the perspective of engineers, managers, and researchers. We review the literature and develop a DevOps conceptual map, correlating the DevOps automation tools with these concepts. We then discuss their practical implications for engineers, managers, and researchers. Finally, we critically explore some of the most relevant DevOps challenges reported by the literature.