Development

Analysis of a domain
Design of a solution
Implementation
Testing

Operations

IT infrastructure
Deployment
Maintenance

Silo mentality

silos

No silos

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?

Risk management
- Reduce the probability of failure
- Detect defects before hitting the market
- Quickly react to problems
Resource exploitation
- Use human resources for human-y work
- Reduce time to market
- Embrace innovation
- Exploit emerging technologies

DevOps

Principles
Practices
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](https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME52107.2021.00051)

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

old-arch

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2
MTTR (hours)	36
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Microservice-ified architecture

new-arch

CI Pipeline

pipeline

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2
MTTR (hours)	36
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2
MTTR (hours)	36
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2
MTTR (hours)	36
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2	7.1	+255%
MTTR (hours)	36
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2	7.1	+255%
MTTR (hours)	36	0.5	-98.6%
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2	7.1	+255%
MTTR (hours)	36	0.5	-98.6%
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16	0.35	-97.8%
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2	7.1	+255%
MTTR (hours)	36	0.5	-98.6%
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16	0.35	-97.8%
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120	9	-92.5%
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2	7.1	+255%
MTTR (hours)	36	0.5	-98.6%
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16	0.35	-97.8%
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120	9	-92.5%
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30	0	-100%
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2	7.1	+255%
MTTR (hours)	36	0.5	-98.6%
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16	0.35	-97.8%
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120	9	-92.5%
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30	0	-100%
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40	19	-52.5%
Issue resolution time (days)	4

Metric	Prev.	Now	Change
Release frequency ( $\frac{r e l e a s e s}{d a y}$ )	0.071	2.7	+3700%
Commit to release time (hours)	8 to 24	0.19	~ -98.5%
Commits per day ( $\frac{c o m m i t s}{d a y}$ )	2	7.1	+255%
MTTR (hours)	36	0.5	-98.6%
Prod. env. setup (working hours)	16	0.35	-97.8%
Dev. env. setup (minutes)	120	9	-92.5%
Nightly downtime ( $\frac{m i n u t e s}{n i g h t}$ )	30	0	-100%
Support ticket frequency ( $\frac{t i c k e t s}{m o n t h}$ )	40	19	-52.5%
Issue resolution time (days)	4	3	-25%

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

timeline

Development + Operations

Software Process Engineering

Danilo Pianini — `danilo.pianini@unibo.it`

Compiled on: 2025-08-14 — printable version

back

Development + Operations

Software Process Engineering

Danilo Pianini — `danilo.pianini@unibo.it`

Compiled on: 2025-08-14 — printable version

back

Development + Operations

Software Process Engineering

Danilo Pianini — danilo.pianini@unibo.it

Danilo Pianini — `danilo.pianini@unibo.it`