Interview questions

This page presents the set of questions that we used to guide our semi-structured interviews to find out how companies are structuring departments toward continuous delivery. According to Adams[1], “Conducted conversationally with one respondent at a time, the semi-structured interviews (SSI) employs a blend of closed - and open - ended questions, often accompanied by follow - up why or how questions. The dialogue can meander around the topics on the agenda — rather than adhering slavishly to verbatim questions as in a standardized survey — and may delve into totally unforeseen issues.”

Starting the interview

• Research objective.
• Audio recording: kept secret.
• In our publications interviewed companies and people will be anonymous.
• Research results will be sent.

Main questions

• Please, tell me about your company, your role within your company, and the project in which are currently working.
• Who is responsible for deploying the solution in production?
• In a new project, who builds the new environment?
• And about the Cloud? PaaS / serverless?
• Who is in charge for non-functional requirements?
  • Integrity, availability, flow rate, response time.
  • Capacity planning, load balancing, overload management, timeout and retrials configuration.
  • Deploys without unavailability.
• Who is responsible for configuring monitoring?
• Who is responsible for tracking the monitoring?
• Who is on-call?
  • After-hours frequency
  • Blameless post-mortem?

Delivery performance

• Time from commit to production
  • < 1h / 1 week < t < 1 month / > 1 month
• Deployment frequency
  • Under demand (many times per day)
  • 1 per week < f < 1 per month
  • f > 1 per month
• Mean time for repair
  • < 1h / < 1 day / 1 day < t < 1 week / > 1 week
• Frequency of failures (% of deliveries)
  • 0 - 1% / 1 - 15% / 15 - 30% / 30 - 50% / More than 50%
• Reasons for the above results
• What would you change in this work system of your team/company?
• Why is it hard to implement such changes?
• Why did this problem arise? Why do they remain?

Specific questions

(Asked depending on the situation)

• Inter-team communication; problem?
  • Little communication? Over communication?
• Are different teams aligned (committed to the project)?
  • How do this happen?
  • Consequences
• Clear definition of responsibilities?
  • If not, any problem?
  • If yes, long hand-offs?
• DevOps team?
• DevOps role?
• If there are no “dedicated ops”: how do software engineers improve their skills on infrastructure?
  • Were they hired with such skills?
  • Everyone in the team knows about infrastructure?
  • How people are chosen for “knowing more” about infrastructure. *Is there any kind of incentive from the company about continuous education? community of practices
  • FLOSS
  • internships
  • teams mutation
  • timeshare for studying
• If a team needs knowledge/skills that they do not have, what to do?
  • Study with team mate.
  • Search for help in another teams
  • Search for in-home specialist
  • Search for external consultant
• Does each team have their own specialists? Are there shared specialists?
  • Sharing policy
  • Handoffs problems

Extra questions

• DBA
  • Is there production problems related to database?
• Security experts
  • Developers’ security awareness
  • Were vulnerabilities found in production?
• Microservices

Finishing the interview

• Do you have any question for me or any concluding remarks?

[1] William C. Adams. 2010. Conducting semi-structured interviews. In Handbook of Practical Program Evaluation (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass