Requirements management in DevOps environments: a multivocal mapping study

Attention is currently being focused on DevOps, which aims to reduce software development time by means of close collaboration between the development and operations areas. However, little effort has been made to determine the role of requirements management in DevOps. The objective of this study is to help both researchers and practitioners by providing an overview of the best practices regarding requirements engineering in DevOps and identifying which areas still need to be investigated. A multivocal mapping study has, therefore, been carried out in order to study which methodologies, techniques and tools are used to support requirements management in DevOps environments. After applying the review protocol, 37 papers from formal literature and 14 references from grey literature were selected for analysis. The general conclusions obtained after analysing these papers were that, within DevOps, more attention should be paid to: (1) the reuse of requirements in order to identify systems and software artefacts that can serve as a basis for the specification of new projects; (2) the communication of requirements between the different areas of an organisation and the stakeholders of a project; (3) the traceability of requirements in order to identify the relationship with other requirements, artefacts, tasks and processes; (4) non-functional requirements in order to identify the requirements of the operations area in the early phases of a project; and finally (5) specific requirements tools that should be seamlessly integrated into the DevOps toolchain. All these issues must be considered without ignoring the agile and continuous practices of development, operations and business teams. More effort must also be made to validate new methodologies in industry so as to assess and determine their strengths and weaknesses.