Relationship of DevOps to Agile, Lean and Continuous Deployment A Multivocal Literature Review Study

In recent years, the DevOps phenomenon has attaracted interest amongst practitioners and researchers in software engineering, reflecting the greater emphasis on collaboration between development and IT operations. However, despite this growing interest, DevOps is often conflated with agile and continuous deployment approaches of software development. This study compares DevOps with agile, lean and continuous deployment approaches in software development from four perspectives: origin, adoption, implementation and goals. The study also reports on the claimed effects and on the metrics of DevOps used to asses those effects. The research is based on an interpretative analysis of qualitative data from documents describing DevOps and practitioner's responses in a DevOps workshop. Our findings indicate that the DevOps phenomenon originated from continuous deployment as an evolution of agile software development, informed by a lean principles background. It was also concluded that successful adoption of DevOps requires agile software development.