Description

Releasing a software product often is seen as the end point of the software development process: everything's implemented, time to earn some cash! Of course, quite the opposite is true. First of all, setting up reliable, trustworthy release engineering and DevOps processes is not trivial. While a lot of open-source tools exist to assist organizations in achieving continuous delivery of their software products, it is not trivial to know how to best combine and use such tools to improve code integration, continuous test infrastructure, environment provisioning, deployment/release and monitoring of operations. Furthermore, the increasing integration of AI models in software products requires major changes to the way in which release engineering processes are designed. Finally, estimates of 40 to 80% of software development costs are spent during software maintenance activities after release, i.e., to fix bugs, improve the user experience and add new functionality. Hence, MCIS' mission is to help practitioners release, operate and maintain their software systems, based on mixed-methods empirical research on software development, release and production data stored in organizations' repositories (e.g., Git, mailing list archives, bug repositories, review environments, run-time logs).