Challenges in devops engineering: a study of stack overflow posts

Abstract

Devops practices combine software development and IT (Information Technology) operations. Our continuous need for rapid but quality software development necessitates adopting high-quality devops tools. Therefore, learning about the challenges devops engineers face while using the currently available tools and techniques is essential. The online developer forum Stack Overflow (SO) is popular among devops engineers. We observed a growing number of posts in SO regarding devops discussions. However, we are aware of no previous study that analyzed SO posts to learn the challenges on devops engineers discussed in SO. In our project, we separated 174K SO posts that contain devops related discussions. We have applied the topic modeling algorithm LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to the posts and analyzed the popularity and difficulty of the topics across several dimensions. We found that there are 23 devops topics grouped into four categories: Cloud & CI/CD Tools, Infrastructure as Code, Container Orchestration, and Quality Assurance. Since 2014, all topic categories have evolved with more questions per year. Among the five devops phases, continuous deployment and integration phases are the two most discussed across the topics. The file management and script execution topics from the category Infrastructure as Code are the most popular (with the most views). At the same time, test automation and git CI/CD support are the topics with the most number of questions without accepted answers. We conducted a survey of 21 professional devops practitioners by asking their opinions about the key findings from our study. They agree with our conclusions and mention that it requires hands-on experience before current devops practices and tools can be considered easy. Relevant vendors can use our results to develop new tools and practitioners (e.g., developers) to guide their learning of devops practices (e.g., start with more popular devops tools).