Devops Round-Trip Engineering: Traceability From Dev To Ops And Back Again

DevOps engineers follow an iterative and incremental process to develop Deployment and Configuration (D&C) specifications. Such a process likely involves manual bug discovery, inspection, and modifications to the running environment. Failing to update the specifications appropriately leads to technical debt, including configuration drift, snowflake configurations, and erosion across environments. Despite the efforts that DevOps teams put into automating operations work, there is a lack of tools to support the development and maintenance of D&C specifications. In this paper, we propose TORNADO, a two-way Continuous Integration (CI) framework (i.e., Dev ->(CI)Ops and Dev ->(CI)Ops) that automatically updates D&C specifications when the corresponding system changes, enabling bi-directional traceability of the modifications. TORNADO extends the concept of CI, integrating operations work into development by committing code corresponding to manual modifications. We evaluated TORNADO by implementing a proof of concept using Terraform templates, OpenStack and CircleCI, demonstrating its feasibility and soundness.