DevOps critical success factors-A systematic literature review

Context: DevOps is a set of software development and operation practices and a recent addition to a large family of different kinds of software process models. The model emerged out of the observation that information systems operations and developments should be closely integrated activities to ensure the success of any organization. Thus, DevOps methods are an additive tool for companies to improve overall performance in their software development processes and operations.Objective: This paper aims to identify the various critical success factors (CSFs) of DevOps projects that have been discussed in prior research. In addition, this study proposes a comprehensive framework for depicting how these CSFs impact or drive DevOps success.Method: This study consists of a systematic literature review to collect the primary articles for the analysis.Results: After searches in four major publication databases and snowballing, we selected 38 primary studies for the analysis. Nearly 100 different CSFs were identified, which were then categorized into Technical, Organizational, and Social & Cultural dimensions. Based on the results of the literature analysis, a comprehensive framework is proposed that depicts how the CSFs impact or drive DevOps success.Conclusion: This paper presents a DevOps framework with various CSFs based on prior literature. The proposed framework will provide collective knowledge of DevOps success factors, which will allow researchers and practitioners to enhance their understanding of CSFs and learn how to handle DevOps issues in organizations. In particular, the paper highlights a number of future research directions related to CSFs.