Slides for the talk on "Investigating Software Engineering Artifacts in DevOps Through the Lens of Boundary Objects" at the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) conference 2023. https://conf.researchr.org/details/ease-2023/ease-2023-research/2/Investigating-Software-Engineering-Artifacts-in-DevOps-Through-the-Lens-of-Boundary-O Christoph Matthies, Robert Heinrich, and Rebekka Wohlrab. 2023. "Investigating Software Engineering Artifacts in DevOps Through the Lens of Boundary Objects". In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 12–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593434.3593441

1. Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
christoph.matthies@hpi.de
@chrisma0
Investigating Software Engineering Artifacts
in DevOps Through the Lens
of Boundary Objects
Christoph Matthies, Robert Heinrich, Rebekka Wohlrab
June 2023
Oulu
https://conf.researchr.org/home/ease-2023

2. Boundary Objects
2
A theory from sociology applied to engineering organizations
“
[...] have different meanings in different social
worlds but their structure is common enough
to more than one world to make them
recognizable, a means of translation [SG89]
”
[SG89] S. L. Star & J. R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional Ecology, “Translations and Boundary Objects:
Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology”, 1907-39.
Social Studies of Science 19, 3 (aug 1989), 387–420

3. Boundary Objects
3
A real-world example (also used to explain in interviews)

4. Methodology
■ Exploratory multiple case study [Eas+08]
□ 9 study sites, 12 interviews with industry practitioners
□ Median 9.5 years of work experience
4
[Eas+08] S. Easterbrook, J. Singer, M.-A. Storey & D. Damian. 2008. “Selecting empirical methods for
software engineering research”. In Guide to advanced empirical software engineering. 285–311.
1. Collaboration practices, coordination of dev
and ops roles, significance of engineering artifacts
2. Introduction of Boundary Object concept
3. Reflection on concept in daily work
■ Semi-Structured Interviews

5. Boundary Objects
5
A real-world example (also used to explain in interviews)

6. Research Questions
RQ1 Categories of artifacts employed
as Boundary Objects?
6
Areas of inquiry within the research paper
RQ2 Which stakeholders are involved?
RQ3 Where do practitioners see concerns?
RQ4 What attributes influence
Boundary Object relevance?

7. Research Questions
RQ1 Categories of artifacts employed
as Boundary Objects?
7
Presented in this talk
RQ4 What attributes influence
Boundary Object relevance?

8. DevOps Boundary Objects
8
Categories of Boundary Objects identified by study participants
Dev. Ops.

9. DevOps Boundary Objects
9
Examples of Boundary Objects identified by study participants
Dev. Ops.
■ Sprint Backlog Entry
■ Pseudo-Code
■ Metrics Dashboard
■ Software Log File
■ Wiki Page
■ Code Review Comment
■ Checklists with steps
■ Operations Runbooks

10. Attributes of Boundary Objects
10
Seven attributes that influenced perceptions of relevance
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders

11. DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders
Attributes of Boundary Objects
11
Relative to other objects in a given context, how frequent are updates?
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
■ Notifications on updates
■ Obtained info
outdated quickly
■ “a map might be a
good Boundary Object
because its speed of change is manageable” [Interview K]

12. DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders
Attributes of Boundary Objects
12
How many connections to other engineering artifacts are there?
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Connected-
ness
■ Higher degree of detail without duplication
■ Higher effort to fully explore knowledge
■ Maintenance of links

13. DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders
Attributes of Boundary Objects
13
To what degree will the performance degrade if the object is
unavailable?
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Criticality
■ Described by “how many people can’t work”
■ Consequences of inadequate/missing quality (legal reqs):
“They will literally send you to jail” [Interview K]

14. DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders
Attributes of Boundary Objects
14
How much repeated manual effort is required to update the object?
■ Automate as much as possible (in theory, less in practice)
■ “If communication is ad-hoc, it is slow, get rid of it and automate”
[Interview F]
■ Monitoring and
alerting of
stakeholders
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Level of
Automation

15. DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders
Attributes of Boundary Objects
15
To what degree does the object follow set standards?
■ Highly dependent on context
■ Reports via email vs. Jira task management
■ Structure enables faster understanding
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Structured-
ness

16. DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders
Attributes of Boundary Objects
16
When is the object created and for how long is it relevant?
■ May be used only for a specific development phase
■ Archived or set as read-only
■ May require data only
available later, e.g.
metrics dashboards
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Lifespan

17. DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Frequency of
Change
Connected-
ness
Criticality
Level of
Automation
Structured-
ness
Lifespan
Number of
Stakeholders
Attributes of Boundary Objects
17
How many stakeholders derive value from the object during its lifespan?
■ Includes
non-technical roles
e.g. Product
Management
■ “If a microservice is to
be monetized, the
marketing team
must interact”
[Interview E]
DevOps
Boundary
Objects
Number of
Stakeholders

18. Conclusion
18
■ Previously identified Boundary Objects
present in DevOps contexts
□ E.g. checklists in medicine or software security [Gil+03]
□ No single central coordination objects
■ Starting points for collaboration and
connecting stakeholders
[Gil+03] D.P. Gilliam, T.L. Wolfe, J.S. Sherif, and M. Bishop. 2003. “Software Security
Checklist for the Software Life Cycle”. In Twelfth IEEE International Workshops on
Enabling Technologies (WET 2003). 243–248.

19. Conclusion
19
■ Object attributes inform
knowledge management
□ E.g. Object with two stakeholders,
low criticality, and lacking automation
→ might not be worth maintenance overhead
■ “management of the data generated by the
[DevOps] toolchain is still undervalued” [Col+21]
in practice
[Col+21] A. Colantoni, A. Garmendia, L. Berardinelli, M. Wimmer, and J. Brauer. 2021. “Leveraging
Model-Driven Technologies for JSON Artefacts”. In 24th Int. Conference on Model Driven Engineering
Languages and Systems. 250–260.

20. Conclusion
20
“the more an agile team operates according to
DevOps, the more it benefits from its artifacts [Fors+20]
”
[Fors+20] M. Forsberg Lie, M. Sánchez-Gordón, and R. Colomo-Palacios. 2020. “DevOps in an ISO
13485 Regulated Environment”. In 14th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software
Engineering and Measurement. 1–11.
but the more it needs to
consciously manage the
Boundary Objects that
facilitate collaboration

21. Summary
21

22. Image Sources
22
In order of appearance
■ area by Nithinan Tatah from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)
■ Document by Liberus from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)
■ Document by DinosoftLab from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)
■ Definition by Eko Purnomo from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)
■ explain by Iconographer from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)
■ Hiking Map (hiking-map_926245) by sclance.com
■ interview by Mutualism from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)
■ Architectural Design software diagram by heinzhafner.de
■ Question by Alzam from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)
■ conclusion by WEBTECHOPS LLP from Noun Project (CCBY3.0)