The never-ending story–How companies transition to and sustain continuous software engineering practices

Structured abstract Context – There is increasing interest in Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) among practitioners and researchers. CSE addresses the need to increase flexibility and short release cycles, especially when augmenting software as a service, without jeopardizing software quality. Purpose/objectives – Empirical literature focuses on the transition to CSE as introducing a new method supported by new tools and architectural concepts. Little is known, however, about how software companies sustain CSE practices. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis proceeds in two stages. First, we present a thematic analysis based on qualitative interviews with both management and developers from three different software development organizations. Then we apply the concept of infrastructuring to the results as a sense-making device. Findings - We show how companies adapt and align their CSE organization, processes, and techniques to internal and external demands and conditions, resulting in widely varying practices. We further see that CSE in the companies is unlikely to arrive at a stable state. Rather, the companies continuously adapt their practices due to changes in the environment, requirements, new techniques and tools, and new software dependencies. Implications/value – We use the concept of ‘infrastructuring’ from computer supported cooperative work and information systems to make sense of the continuous change we see in our interviews. We show that CSE needs to be regarded as a new way to make use of method (elements), processes and tools in software engineering, rather than a new method.