FOCUS Identification and prioritization of DevOps success factors using fuzzy- AHP approach Muhammad Azeem Akbar 1 • Sajjad Mahmood 2 • Muhammad Shafiq 3 • Ahmed Alsanad 4 • Abeer Abdul-Aziz Alsanad 5 • Abdu Gumaei 4 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract DevOps (development and operations) is a collaborative and multidisciplinary organizational effort to automate continuous delivery of a software project with an aim to improve software quality. The implementation of DevOps practices is not straightforward as there are several complexities associated with it. The aim of this study is to identify and prioritize the factors that positively influence the DevOps practices in software organizations. Using a systematic literature review, 19 factors were identified. The identified factors were further validated with experts via a questionnaire survey study. Finally, Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) was used to prioritize the identified success factors. The results indicate that ‘‘DevOps security pipeline,’’ ‘‘use system orchestration’’ and ‘‘attempt matrix organization and transparency’’ factors are the highest ranked success factors for the successful implementation of DevOps practices. The FAHP analysis is novel in this research area as it provides the prioritization based taxonomy of the identified factors which will assist the researchers and practitioners to focus on the critical areas that are significant for the successful adoption of DevOps practices. Keywords DevOps  Fuzzy AHP  Success factors  Systematic literature review  Empirical investigation 1 Introduction Lately, DevOps is one of the widely used development methodology with an aim to minimize cost of software development by adopting continues development and continues delivery (Ce ´spedes et al. 2019; Sacks 2012). In DevOps, the development and operation teams work together to improve their delivery process. The DevOps focuses on sharing tasks and responsibilities within a team from development to deployment and support. Hence, in a DevOps paradigm, cross-functionality, shared responsibil- ities and trust between the development teams and clients are encouraged (Farid et al. 2017). DevOps essentially extends the continuous development goals of the agile movement to continuous integration and release. To accommodate continuous releases, DevOps encourages automation of the change, configuration and release pro- cesses (Jabbari et al. 2016; Lwakatare et al. 2016). In this study, we adopted the definition of Leite et al. (2019): ‘‘DevOps is a collaborative and multidisciplinary effort within an organization to automate continuous delivery of new software versions while guaranteeing their correctness and reliability.’’ Communicated by Hemen Dutta. & Muhammad Azeem Akbar azeem.akbar@ymail.com & Ahmed Alsanad aasanad@ksu.edu.sa 1 College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China 2 Information and Computer Science Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia 3 School of Computer Science and Technology, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China 4 Research Chair of Artificial Intelligence (RCAI), Department of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 5 Information Systems Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Imam Muhammad Ibn-Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 123 Soft Computing https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-05150-w