CMMI Guided Process Improvement for DevOps Projects: An Exploratory Case Study

Very recently, an increasing number of software companies adopted DevOps to adapt themselves to the ever-changing business environment. While it is important to mature adoption of the DevOps for these companies, no dedicated maturity models for DevOps exist. Meanwhile, maturity models such as CMMI models have demonstrated their effects in the traditional paradigm of software industry, however, it is not clear whether the CMMI models could guide the improvements with the context of DevOps. This paper reports a case study aiming at evaluating the feasibility to apply the CMMI models to guide process improvement for DevOps projects and identifying possible gaps. Using a structured method(i.e., SCAMPI C), we conducted a case study by interviewing four employees from one DevOps project. Based on evidence we collected in the case study, we managed to characterize the maturity/capability of the DevOps project, which implies the possibility to use the CMMI models to appraise the current processes in this DevOps project and guide future improvements. Meanwhile, several gaps also are identified between the CMMI models and the DevOps mode. In this sense, the CMMI models could be taken as a good foundation to design suitable maturity models so as to guide process improvement for projects adopting the DevOps.