Conceptualising and defining DevOps: a review for understanding, not a framework for practitioners

Abstract

In their abstract, Gall and Pigni (2022) claim that the information systems and software engineering literature “fails to convey what DevOps is”, and that “the lack of homogeneous and clear conceptualization of DevOps is considered a major obstacle to the diffusion of this methodology”. We strongly disagree with the first statement, and we also feel that the call for a homogeneous and clear conceptualisation of DevOps may be too demanding given the industrial stance of the paper. It does not mean that relevant definitions do not exist, nor does it mean that DevOps constitutes a methodology. Second, we also strongly disagree with the claim that their review is a critical review. It seems that the authors perform a review for understanding (Rowe, 2014), or more precisely for characterising DevOps, but they don’t do this in an especially critical way. They also use other qualifiers for their review: systematic and realist. We also have some reservations about these. Third, the authors believe that their review and the resulting framework will provide guidance and help organisations transition to DevOps. We raise some doubts about this objective, about the orientation of the review and about the framework concerning practitioners. The authors may find our critique unfair (Rowe & Markus, 2018). Therefore, we start this response paper by recognising several merits of the Gall & Pigni paper, including the identification of most of their main research paths, and offering a few complementary ideas.