Agile Development and Operation of Complex Systems in Multi-technology and Multi-company Environments: Following a DevOps Approach

Big innovation and research projects usually require merging contributions form organizations with expertise in different domains. Managing and participating in multi-company projects that use multiple state-of-the-art technologies constitute a challenging activity due to many factors such as integration inexperience, evolving components, tentative requirements, independent teams or independent management centers. In the late nineties and in the early years of 2000, several methodologies arose with the focus on fast releases of working software, commonly known as agile, that aimed to address many of the challenges that this kind of projects face. However, in most cases, these methodologies were not fully adoptable as the automation investment was too high and it was not recoverable during the duration of the project. The global servitization trend and the appearance of approaches, such as DevOps, to support the continuous and fast adjustment of those services to stay in business has also impacted innovation and research projects. On one hand, matured technologies that reduce the automation investment have arisen. On the other hand, whenever it makes sense, services which benefit from the application of DevOps approaches are required to be implemented. This paper explains the implementation of DevOps approaches to support the agile development in the context of innovation and research projects. It also describes two practical implementation cases where such approaches were implemented and how they evolved in the course of the time.