Integrating change requests in a CI/CD pipeline

Abstract: With the advent of DevOps and its success stories, many large firms in the regulatory sector have begun to study more streamlined software deployment strategies. Traceability and change management is vital in these regulated organizations to keep track of when, why, and what was supplied to the production environment at what time. This thesis intends to provide a technique for one of the major banks in Sweden to deploy software using Azure DevOps pipelines while employing tracing and approving a deployment in an on-premises change management system. Since direct communication between the change management system and Azure DevOps is not possible, the decision was made to create an on-premises RFC handler and use Azure storage account queues to facilitate communication between pipelines searching for deployment grants and the on-premises change management system. To determine what value the RFC handler could provide the organization, interviews were conducted with several change management experts at the bank. One of the most notable conclusions from the interviews was that the RFC handler would likely reduce deployment time relative the old workflow.