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Continuous Development

Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Continuous Software Engineering has been gaining signifiant momentum in terms of widespread adoption among large and small Software houses. This paradigm shift is based on the promise of early, frequent delivery and deployment of software features and continuous feedback on the usefulness and adoption of the features. One of the key challenging area of practice for continuous software engineering is architecting – Software development teams are expected to adopt new conceptualisation and designing approaches and design decision making processes – for example, moving from monolithic to micro services. Given the significant challenges of architectural issues in DevOps, it is important to build and share evidence-based body of knowledge about practices and processes for architectural support in Continuous Software Engineering. We have undertaken a significant research program on this topic and one of our comprehensive pieces of of work has just been accepted in a premier Software Engineering journal with the title of, An Empirical Study of Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment, following is the abstract copied from the paper for the readers of this blog. The paper’s pre-print copies will be available soon. Read More »Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment

A 360 Review on Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment

The increasing amount of literature on Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CDE), and Continuous Deployment (CD) has stimulated the need and desire of secondary studies. Recently, there have been several reviews published on CI, CDE, and CD, mostly in Software Engineering journal. Whilst these reviews have made important contributions to the body of knowledge about CI, CDE, CD, there was no significant effort to perform an integrated review of these three practices areas, which are so much intertwined that it is critically important that the key pieces of work on these topics are reviewed in an integrated fashion. Such an integrated review is expected to provide the researchers and practitioners with a 360 degree view on the approaches, tools, and challenges in these areas. We have tried to address this need through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment: A Systematic Review on Approaches, Tools, Challenges, which has been recently published in IEEE Access. We are really excited to have this work done as it would fill important gaps left by other secondary studies on these important topics. Our review also critically comparing the existing reviews and our work that is an important part of progressing the state of the art in an emerging area. I’m copying/pasting the abstract for the readers’ interests as a teaser leading to a full read of the article. We also welcome comments.

Read More »A 360 Review on Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment

Collaborative Project with NICTA on Architecting for DevOps Starts

We have recently started a collaborative project with the Software Systems Research Group of National ICT Australia in Sydney. The project is aimed at understanding and addressing new challenges for designing architectures of complex systems that would be following the Continuous deployment (CD) and DevOps paradigm. CD and DevOps have emerged as an auspicious software development movements, which try to establish a strong connection between development and operations teams. Adopting and supporting CD/DevOps for industrial organizations involves a large number of challenges because organizational processes, practices, and tool support may not be ready to support the highly complex and challenging nature of DevOps. Like many others, we have found that the most pressing challenges which the organizations may encounter is how software applications should be architected to support CD/DevOps practices such as Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, Continuous Monitoring and Optimization and Continuous Deployment. Read More »Collaborative Project with NICTA on Architecting for DevOps Starts