Management challenges for DevOps adoption within UK SMEs
Open accessAbstract
The DevOps phenomenon is gathering pace as more UK organisations seek to leverage the benefits it can potentially bring to software engineering functions. However substantial organisational change is inherent to adopting DevOps, especially where there are prior and established methods. As part of a wider piece of doctoral research investigating the management challenges of DevOps adoption, we present early findings of a six month qualitative diary study following the adoption of DevOps within a UK based SME with over 200 employees. We find that within our case study organisation, the DevOps approach is being adopted for the development of a new system used both internally and by customers. DevOps, conceptually, appears to be generally well regarded, but in reality is proving difficult to fully adopt. This difficulty is down to a combination of necessity in maintaining a legacy system, lack of senior management buy-in, managerial structure and resistance. Additionally, we are finding evidence of job crafting, especially with the software developers. Taken together, we put forward the argument that DevOps is an interdisciplinary topic which would greatly benefit from further management and potentially psychology oriented research attention.
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Less resistance to change and stable management structures may facilitate the adoption of DevOps.
“In [109 ], The researcher noted that less resistance to change and stable management structures may facilitate the adoption of DevOps.”
From Challenges and Solutions in Implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing for Agile Quality Assurance (2023) · cites this paper as [109]
Section 4.2, “Management Structure and Resistance” (page unavailable), describes IT operations’ resistance and says the management structure enables disruption, supporting the point that less resistance may help DevOps adoption. It recommends a specific reporting arrangement—both teams reporting to the same line manager—but does not say that stable management structures facilitate adoption. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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Research works printed but not linked: 10
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- S. Hosono and Y. Shimomura. Application lifecycle kit for mass customization on paas platforms. In Services (SERVICES), 2012 IEEE Eighth World Congress on, pages 397-398. IEEE, 2012.
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- A. Wrzesniewski and J. E. Dutton. Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2):179-201, 2001.
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Grande, R., Vizcaíno, A., & García, F. O. (2024) · Computer Standards & Interfaces · doi:10.1016/j.csi.2023.103767 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Bhanushali, A. (2023) · International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR) · doi:10.21275/sr231021114758 · Cited by 11 · see citing works
- Authors
- Jones, S., Noppen, J., & Lettice, F.
- Affiliations
- University of East Anglia (GB)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Quality-Aware DevOps
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2016-07-21
- Pages
- 7-11
- OpenAlex
- W2394743071
- Cited by
- 52
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 1.98
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk
- Locations
- International Workshop on Quality-Aware DevOps (QUDOS) (publishedVersion)
- UEA Digital Repository (University of East Anglia) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Software System Performance and Reliability
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering › Digital Transformation in Industry
- Keywords
- DevOps adoption, management problems, small and medium-sized enterprises, organizational change, legacy systems, management structure, resistance to change, job crafting, software developers, software engineering management
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