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. 

 The main objective of this project is to develop and evaluate a new generation of framework, reference architectures, guidelines, and tools to support architectural decision‐making process in the DevOps context and CD/DevOps-amenable applications. The framework and associated tool will be built upon the large-scale empirical study involving practitioners who have invaluable experiences in architecting for DevOps. This framework and tooling support help documenting several aspects of DevOps-specific decisions, patterns and reusable components. I’ll sharing the more details about the project goals and progress through these pages as we make progress on the project. This project will draw the research efforts from Mojtaba Shahin, a PhD students at University of Adelaide, Dr. Liming Zhu, research leader for Software Engineering in Software Systems Group at NICTA, and myself. There will be another PhD student on the project and several thesis students will join the project effort. We all are very excited about working on this collaborative project for creating some excellent results.