DevOps Round-trip Engineering: Traceability from Dev to Ops and Back Again

EasyChair Preprint 491

Abstract

DevOps engineers follow an iterative and incremental process to develop Deployment and Configuration (D&C) specifications. Such a process likely involves manual bug discovery, inspection, and modifications to the running environment. Failing to update the specifications appropriately leads to technical debt, including configuration drift, snowflake configuration, and erosion across environments. Despite the efforts that DevOps teams put into automating operation work, there is a lack of tools to support the development and maintenance of D&C specifications. In this paper, we propose TORNADO, a two-way Continuous Integration (CI) framework (i.e., Dev→Ops and Dev←Ops) that automatically updates D&C specifications when the corresponding system changes, enabling bi-directional traceability of the modifications. Panorama extends the concept of CI, integrating operations work into development by committing code corresponding to manual modifications. We evaluated Panorama by implementing a proof of concept using Terraform templates, OpenStack and CircleCI, demonstrating its feasibility and soundness.

Keyphrases: Continuous Integration, DevOps, Traceability, round-trip engineering, software deployment

@booklet{EasyChair:491,
  author    = {Miguel Jiménez and Norha M. Villegas and Gabriel Tamura and Hausi A. Müller},
  title     = {DevOps Round-trip Engineering: Traceability from Dev to Ops and Back Again},
  doi       = {10.29007/gq5x},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 491},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2018}}