Designing Software Architecture to Support Continuous Delivery and DevOps: A Systematic Literature Review Robin Bolscher and Maya Daneva University of Twente, Drienerlolaan 5, Enschede, The Netherlands
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[email protected] Keywords: Software Architecture, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, DevOps, Deployability, Systematic Literature Review, Micro-services. Abstract: This paper presents a systematic literature review of software architecture approaches that support the implementation of Continuous Delivery (CD) and DevOps. Its goal is to provide an understanding of the state- of-the-art on the topic, which is informative for both researchers and practitioners. We found 17 characteristics of a software architecture that are beneficial for CD and DevOps adoption and identified ten potential software architecture obstacles in adopting CD and DevOps in the case of an existing software system. Moreover, our review indicated that micro-services are a dominant architectural style in this context. Our literature review has some implications: for researchers, it provides a map of the recent research efforts on software architecture in the CD and DevOps domain. For practitioners, it describes a set of software architecture principles that possibly can guide the process of creating or adapting software systems to fit in the CD and DevOps context. 1 INTRODUCTION designing new software architectures tailored for CD and DevOps practices. The practice of releasing software early and often has For clarity, before elaborating on the subject of been increasingly more adopted by software this SLR, we present the definitions of the concepts organizations (Fox et al., 2014) in order to stay that we will address: Software architecture of a competitive in the software market.