What Practitioners Really Think About Continuous Software Engineering: A Taxonomy of Challenges

Abstract: The Continuous software engineering is a collaborative software development environment which offers the continues development and deployment of quality software project within short time. The Continuous software engineering practices are not yet mature enough, and the software organizations hesitate to adopt it. This study aims: (1) to explore the Continuous software engineering challenges by conducting systematic literature review (SLR) and to get the insight of industry experts via questionnaire survey study; (2) to prioritize the investigated challenges using fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP). The study findings provides the set of critical challenges faced by the software organizations while adopting Continuous software engineering and a prioritization based taxonomy of the Continuous software engineering challenges. The application of FAHP is novel in this research area as it assists in addressing the vagueness of practitioners concerning the influencing factors of Continuous software engineering. We believe that the finding of this study will serve as a body of knowledge for real world practitioners and researchers to revise and develop the new strategies for the successful implementation of Continuous software engineering practices in the software industry.