Brian Fitzgerald is Director of Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre where he previously held the role of Chief Scientist. He holds an endowed professorship, the Krehbiel Chair in Innovation in Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he also served as Vice President Research.
He recently served as President of the Association for Information Systems, the global body for information systems worldwide.
He holds a PhD from the University of London and his research interests lie primarily in software development, encompassing open source and inner source, crowdsourcing software development, agile and lean software development, and global software development.
His publications include 17 books, and almost 200 peer-reviewed articles in the leading international journals and conferences in both the Information Systems and Software Engineering fields, including MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Information Systems Research (ISR), IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology (TOSEM). Prior to taking up an academic position, he worked in the software industry for about 12 years, including positions with Citibank in Frankfurt and Brussels
BizDevOps: From Business Idea to Consumer Product on a Weekly Basis
Abstract
The move from waterfall-based approaches to agile approaches to software development over the past twenty years represented a paradigm shift in the software development field. We are at the cusp of a similar paradigm shift at present in the transformation from agile approaches to continuous software development. The latter is very much driven by fundamental lean concepts such as flow, continuous improvement, evidence-based decision-making, and elimination of waste. These lean concepts have long been applied in manufacturing and are widely accepted as leading to superior performance and competitive advantage. In a similar vein, the recent emphasis on DevOps recognises that the integration between software development and its deployment needs to be a continuous one. We argue that a similar continuity is required between business strategy and development. We suggest the more holistic term, BizDevOps, to characterise this phenomenon. The clear message from the above is that the continuous software development process required for BizDevOps is a holistic concept with many implications for process, tooling/automation and organizational cultural norms and practices.
