Improving the IBM Continuous Delivery Pipeline: Towards a framework of Best Practices in the Design and Adoption of Continuous Delivery tools

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project aims to improve the design of IBM's Continuous Delivery (CD) tool to address the adoption challenges faced by its customers. CD represents a new way of developing software and a recent and rising trend in academic research. It is a paradigm shift to the automation of building, testing, and deploying software in a repeatable way while continually adding value to customers. The automation of these software tasks is supported by various CD tools, which enable organizations to implement CD practices. CD presents extensive benefits for organizations, including the automation of otherwise expensive and error-prone manual tasks, receiving quick feedback from customers, always having a reliable release candidate, and streamlining cross-organizational tasks. However, CD faces challenges in adoption, each of which lacks a full understanding of best practices for organizations. As a leader in software development, IBM developed a CD toolsuite (referred to as IBM's CD tool henceforth) as part of its Cloud offering. However, the tool is experiencing problems with expanding the user base and is missing feature to be competitive in a growing market of CD tools. Unfortunately, the missing features have led to significant challenges in effectively deploying, maintaining, and expanding the feature set on an ongoing basis, thus limiting the ability to develop new and desired features.The research project will follow a design science methodology to identify shortcomings in IBM's CD tool functionality, as related to these challenges. We will study the adoption challenges experienced by IBM's CD tool users, its internal developers, as well as users of other CD tools. We will then develop a framework of best practices in the design and adoption of CD tools that can be instantiated and acted upon at IBM, among others. More specifically IBM will benefit from this framework in 1.) the design of an improved IBM CD tool to mitigate the current set of adoption challenges and 2.) an on-going assessment of the best practices in the adoption of the IBM CD tool at its customers.