Assuring the Evolvability of Legacy Systems in Devops Transformation/Adoption: Insights of an Experience Report

Abstract

DevOps has changed the software industry to enable continuous delivery. While many studies have investigated on how to introduce DevOps into a software product from the organizational perspective, less is known about the technical challenges developers and practitioners face when transforming legacy codes into DevOps, despite the undisputed importance of this topic. In this paper, throughout the context of web applications, we report the results of a study case with the adoption of four legacy open-source projects into DevOps to understand which refactoring techniques and strategies influence developers’ decisions. We analyze two dependent variables: the technique used and how they are applied to the project. After every implementation, there was an overview of the process that just occurred and later a written report on how the strategies have been applied, their respective order, which strategy has been more fruitful, and such. Those reports have been the foundation of this study. The main findings of such study are that some strategies are more efficient when viewed from the evolution aspect and the sequence these techniques are employed matter.