Context:

To accelerate time-to-market and improve customer satisfaction, software-producing organizations have adopted continuous delivery practices, impacting the relations between development and infrastructure professionals. Yet, no substantial literature has substantially tackled how the software industry structures the organization of development and infrastructure teams.

Objective:

In this study, we investigate how software-producing organizations structure their development and infrastructure teams, specifically how is the division of labor among these groups and how they interact.

Method:

After brainstorming with 7 DevOps experts to better formulate our research and procedures, we collected and analyzed data from 37 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals, following Grounded Theory guidelines.

Results:

After a careful analysis, we identified four common organizational structures: (1) siloed departments, (2) classical DevOps, (3) cross-functional teams, and (4) platform teams. We also observed that some companies are transitioning between these structures.

Conclusion:

The main contribution of this study is a theory in the form of a taxonomy that organizes the found structures along with their properties. This theory could guide researchers and practitioners to think about how to better structure development and infrastructure professionals in software-producing organizations.

中文翻译：

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寻求持续交付的软件团队组织：一种扎根理论方法

语境：

为了加快上市时间并提高客户满意度，软件生产组织采用了持续交付实践，影响了开发人员和基础设施专业人员之间的关系。然而，没有实质性的文献充分解决软件行业如何构建开发和基础设施团队的组织。

客观的：

在这项研究中，我们调查了软件生产组织如何构建他们的开发和基础设施团队，特别是这些群体之间的分工以及他们如何互动。

方法：

在与 7 位 DevOps 专家集思广益以更好地制定我们的研究和程序后，我们按照扎根理论指南收集和分析了来自与 IT 专业人员的 37 次半结构化访谈的数据。

结果：

经过仔细分析，我们确定了四种常见的组织结构：(1) 孤立的部门、(2) 经典 DevOps、(3) 跨职能团队和 (4) 平台团队。我们还观察到一些公司正在这些结构之间过渡。

结论：

这项研究的主要贡献是一种分类学形式的理论，该理论将发现的结构及其属性组织起来。该理论可以指导研究人员和从业人员思考如何在软件生产组织中更好地构建开发和基础设施专业人员。