DevOps maturity in an IT service environment

Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, University of Hamburg (Department of Informatics), course: IT Management and Consulting, language: English, abstract: This thesis acknowledges DevOps as a relevant trend in information systems (IS) research and IT organizations. DevOps will be examined with a focus on characteristics and aspects of implementation and maturity. A maturity model is developed in the context of an organization, based on literary and empirical research. Businesses increasingly depend on IT in order to sell their products and services. Shorter time-to-market is essential and agile software development approaches have emerged, improving collaboration and planning between business and software development. However, while software can be developed iteratively with higher performance and efficiency, these efforts are in vain when IT operations are left out of these changes. Furthermore, iterative development techniques cannot tap the full potential and shorter time-to-market is not achieved while deployments are only possible once every six months. DevOps addresses these problems by promoting shorter release cycles and improved collaboration between development and operations professionals. This thesis uses a systematic literature review to characterize DevOps and determine implementation criteria. Using Action Design Research and interviews at an organization, a maturity model is created to visualize these learnings and give practitioners the ability to assess their organization's DevOps performance. Consecutively, the model is applied to two environments of different DevOps maturity in an IT service environment.