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

改进 IBM 持续交付管道：构建持续交付工具设计和采用的最佳实践框架

• 批准号: 535876-2018
• 负责人: Damian, Daniela
• 金额: $ 3.5万
• 依托单位: University of Victoria
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Collaborative Research and Development Grants
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=720081
• 关键词: Improving; IBM; Continuous; Delivery; Pipeline

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.

该项目旨在改进IBM的持续交付（CD）工具的设计，以解决其客户所面临的采用挑战。CD代表了一种新的软件开发方式，也是最近学术研究的一个新兴趋势。它是以一种可重复的方式向构建、测试和部署软件的自动化转变，同时不断地为客户增加价值。这些软件任务的自动化由各种CD工具支持，这些工具使组织能够实现CD实践。CD为组织提供了广泛的好处，包括自动化昂贵且容易出错的手工任务，从客户那里获得快速反馈，始终拥有可靠的候选版本，以及简化跨组织的任务。然而，CD在采用过程中面临着挑战，每一个挑战都缺乏对组织最佳实践的充分理解。作为软件开发领域的领导者，IBM开发了一个CD工具包（从此以后称为IBM的CD工具）作为其云产品的一部分。然而，该工具在扩展用户基础方面遇到了问题，并且缺少在不断增长的CD工具市场中具有竞争力的功能。不幸的是，缺失的特性导致了在持续的基础上有效地部署、维护和扩展特性集方面的重大挑战，从而限制了开发新特性和所需特性的能力。该研究项目将遵循设计科学方法来识别IBM CD工具功能中与这些挑战相关的缺点。我们将研究IBM的CD工具用户、其内部开发人员以及其他CD工具的用户所经历的采用挑战。然后，我们将开发一个设计和采用CD工具的最佳实践框架，这些工具可以在IBM等机构中实例化和执行。更具体地说，IBM将从这个框架中受益：1.)设计一个改进的IBM CD工具，以减轻当前的采用挑战；2.)对其客户采用IBM CD工具的最佳实践进行持续评估。