A Continuous Certification Methodology for DevOps

The cloud paradigm has revolutionized the way in which software systems are designed, managed, and maintained. With the advent of the microservice architecture, this trend was brought to the extreme, pushing the whole software development process towards unification of software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops). This rapid evolution has not immediately found counterparts in assurance techniques, where the evaluation of the non-functional behavior of a software system and of the software development process are completely decoupled. In this paper, we put forward the idea that next-generation assurance techniques, and more specifically certification techniques, must evaluate a software system throughout the whole development process. To this aim, we define a continuous certification scheme for DevOps that evaluates the software artifacts produced at each stage of the development process. We then present the assurance framework managing our certification scheme and experimentally evaluate the continuous certification scheme in a real DevOps scenario.