DevOps Continuous Integration: Moving Germany’s Federal Employment Agency Test System into Embedded In-Memory Technology

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a continuous integration database test architecture for a highly important and large software application in the public sector in Germany. We apply action design research and draw from two emerging areas of research – DevOps continuous integration practices and in-memory database development – to define the problem, design, build and implement the solution, analyze challenges encountered, and make adjustments. The result is the transformation of a large test environment originally based on Oracle databases into a flexible and fast embedded in-memory architecture. The main challenges involved overcoming the differences between the SQL specifications supported by the development and production systems and optimizing the test runtime performance. The paper contributes to theory and practice by presenting one of the first studies showing a real-world implementation of a successful database test architecture that enables continuous integration, and identifying technical design principles for database test architectures in general.