Patterns for DevOps Pipeline Quality

Francisco José Costa Silva

Key information

Authors:

Francisco José Costa Silva (Francisco José Costa Silva)

Supervisors:

António Manuel Ferreira Rito da Silva (António Manuel Ferreira Rito da Silva)

Published in

11/25/2022

Abstract

Software quality is one of the most important characteristics while the development teams build software products and artifacts. DevOps brought speed and agility and the need to create artifacts with quality to avoid unnecessary future work. This research proposes a qualitative analysis supported by complexity expressions describing pipeline patterns used by small size development teams driven by two of the most common source management strategies, Trunk-based, and Feature Branch. A Systematic Literature Review was executed to assess the current scientific state of the art in DevOps pipeline patterns and Quality Attributes of pipelines. The Design Research Methodology will support the execution of the qualitative analysis, using the pipeline patterns as artifacts. In this research, we observe that while using Trunk-Based Driven Pipelines (TBDP), the development team can rely on full automation of the delivery process driven by pipelines with higher efficiency, security, and reliability. This pipeline type also gives the developers a faster delivery of new features promoted by the pipeline’s high availability. Using Feature-Based Driven Pipelines (FBDP), the development team has more control over the code integration and can rely on isolating new features in a dedicated pipeline during development due to the pipeline’s high suitability for the stakeholders. Due to this pipeline type’s high availability, the development team will also count on the capacity to respond quickly to unplanned releases.