Orchestrating automation and sharing in DevOps teams: a revelatory case of job satisfaction factors, risk and work conditions

ABSTRACT

Agile can be seen as an accelerator to develop software, yet it suffers from bottlenecks between development and operations. DevOps can overcome bottlenecks between agile development teams and operations, notably by providing continuous integration, delivery and deployment, thus improving end-to-end processes between development and operations functions. However, literature on DevOps effects is scant. Using job design characteristics theory and Herzberg’s job satisfaction theory, this paper investigates perceptions of job (dis)satisfaction, risks and work conditions among 59 employees working within 12 agile and DevOps teams in the same firm. Findings show that DevOps provides greater job satisfaction than agile alone. However, this case study also unveiled an effect of risk amplification with DevOps, and the greater need to orchestrate automation and sharing, contingent on work conditions. We theorise that orchestration of interactions between automation and sharing and related risks must be managed to improve job satisfaction when agile teams transition to DevOps.

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

• Likoebe Maruping and Sabine Matook

KEYWORDS:

• Job Satisfaction
• risks
• agile
• devops
• work Conditions

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the reviewers for their feedbacks and to the EJIS Guest Editors for their invaluable help. We also extend our sincere thanks to our two colleagues at Nantes University who engaged with us in this research programme on DevOps : Laetitia Pihel for her contribution to the interviews with senior managers. We also thank Barbara Lyonnet who participated to data collection and analysis related to interviews. We are also grateful to Brian Fitzgerald and to Ojelanki Ngwenyama for helpful discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.