Context: Continuous delivery practices accelerate time to market and improve customer satisfaction. Although recent related work suggests that organizations employing continuous delivery should promote a collaborative culture among different IT teams, there is no substantial literature tackling how organizations should organize their teams to excel in the context of continuous delivery.
Objective: In this study, we investigate how organizations pursuing continuous delivery organize their development and operations teams.
Method: We collected and analyzed data from interviews with 46 IT professionals, following Grounded Theory guidelines.
Results: After a careful analysis, we found four patterns of organizational structures: (1) the siloed departments, (2) the classical DevOps, (3) the cross-functional teams, and (4) the platform teams. This empirical study organizes and presents these structures, alongside their properties, as a taxonomy, which is our theory for organizing software teams in the context of continuous delivery.
