Exploring Between Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment: A Case Study

Abstract: This case study identifies and explores the challenges introducing continuous integration in the hardware/ software vendor and later on continuous deployment. The study also focus on the relation to the Stairway to Heaven model which describes the general evolution of companies in software processes. Today a lot of hardware/software vendor are migrating to continuous deployment to involve the customer collaboration and frequent feature deliveries. The case study is based on findings from a major telecom company being a combined hardware/software vendor that not only delivers software to stable hardware, but also a combination of software and hardware configurations that must work as a complete package. This approach presents some additional challenges which has to be addressed in a way. The research aims to address the challenges of introducing continuous integration at a combined hardware/software vendor. This research was based on a qualitative method and the primary data collection was interviews with software developers and architects at a major telecom company. The types of interview questions was semistructured. The interviews were transcribed and thematic data analysis was conducted to generate findings from transcripts and was applied on the transcribed interviews. The findings were summarized into themes and reported with a graphical approach including a chart and description. We found incontrovertible evidence that the company have experienced challenges which is related to build times, feedback cycle and customer relations. By being a hardware/software vendor, there is some interesting challenges which is not seen in any software companies and this proved our antecedent proposition.