Development + Operations

Software Process Engineering

Danilo Pianini — danilo.pianini@unibo.it

Compiled on: 2024-05-20 — printable version

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Development

• Analysis of a domain
• Design of a solution
• Implementation
• Testing

Operations

• IT infrastructure
• Deployment
• Maintenance

Silo mentality

No silos

DevOps culture

• Increased collaboration

  • Dev and Ops should exchange information and work together

• Shared responsibility

  • A team is responsible for the (sub) product for its whole lifetime
  • No handing over projects from devs to ops

• Autonomous teams

  • Lightweight decision making process

• Focus on the process, not just the product

  • Promote small, incremental changes
  • Automate as much as possible
  • Leverage the right tool for the job at hand

Why bother?

1. Risk management

   • Reduce the probability of failure
   • Detect defects before hitting the market
   • Quickly react to problems

2. Resource exploitation

   • Use human resources for human-y work
   • Reduce time to market
   • Embrace innovation
   • Exploit emerging technologies

DevOps

1. Principles
2. Practices
3. Tools

Principles inspire practices

Practices require tools

DevOps principles

(not exhaustive)

• Collaboration
• Reproducibility
• Automation
• Incrementality
• Robustness

DevOps practices

• Workflow organization
• Build automation
• Self-testing code
• Code quality control
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery
• Continuous Deployment
• Continuous Monitoring

A real-world test case

We applied DevOps (and microservice-ification) to an existing software project, measuring some metrics before and after the operation.

• The detailed experience report has been presented at the 37th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2021)
  • Scientific paper

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The target

Maggioli S.p.A

• Multinational, based in Italy
• ~2000 collaborators at the time of writing
• An internal IT/Operations team
• Our target team was composed of five people

sisred (before intervention)

• Client-server stand-alone application
• Delphi front-end, Microsoft SQL Server backend
• Editors (paid by Maggioli) are experts in law entering information on the client
• The information is then exposed into a (paid access) portal with up-to-date legal information

Previous architecture

Microservice-ified architecture

CI Pipeline

Benefits

• Much less maintenance in the traditional meaning: “Time spent to keep the system in nominal conditions”
  • No more issues with Windows updates
  • No more downtimes related to internal network / electricity / public infrastructure maintenance
  • Improved security
  • No more critical failures caused by testing stored procedures directly in production by mistake
• Much more maintenance in terms of software evolution
  • Application (or verification of automatic application) of updates
  • Security audits
  • Maintenance and update of the pipeline

Lessons learned

• The teams must be autonomous
• Practices must be tailored to the team
• Time-consuming, repetitive, and cumbersome procedures must be automated
• Obsolete practices must be removed
• Communication is key, awareness must be shed across the team of the expected benefits

Timeline

Development + Operations

Software Process Engineering

Danilo Pianini — danilo.pianini@unibo.it

Compiled on: 2024-05-20 — printable version

back