Two months ago, the well reputed Springer Nature journal SN Computer Science, published an article by our colleague Adha Hrusto and co-authors Prof. Per Runeson and Dr. Emelie Engström. The title was “Closing the Feedback Loop in DevOps Through Autonomous Monitors in Operations”. The work presented in the article has been carried out in collaboration with our customers in the region.
“Being published in a journal like this is a large acknowledgement of what you are doing as a PhD student”, says System Verification’s Dr. Magnus C Ohlson, whom is the industrial supervisor. “When you have been working with something for a very long time and it is finally published is a real boost for your self-confidence”.
But that is not all - The DevOps team at the customer has also been boosted, as well as how they are working alerts from system operations. On top of that there are several things to be explored as the project continues.
In more detail, their diagnosis, based on qualitative data collected through interviews and observations, shows that alert flooding is a challenge in the feedback loop, i.e. too many signals from operations create noise in the feedback loop. Therefore, they designed a solution to improve the alert management by optimizing when to raise alerts and accordingly introducing a new element in the feedback loop - a smart filter. They have also implemented a prototype of the proposed solution design and showed that a tighter relation between operations and development can be achieved, using a hybrid method which combines rule-based and unsupervised machine learning for operations data analysis.
This research is a part of the large WASP initiative and Adha will continue to improve the solution together with the customer. If you and your company would like to know more about this type of collaboration, please feel free to contact Magnus for further discussions.