DevOps is a combination of tools and methodologies that aims at improving the software development, build and deploy processes by shortening this lifecycle and improving software quality. Despite its many benefits it still presents many challenges when it comes to its ease of use and accessibility. One of the reasons is the tremendous proliferation of different tools, languages and syntax which makes the field quite difficult to learn and keep up to date.

Our goal with this PhD project is to study a model-driven approach that can abstract the particularities of the different kinds of tools for the different parts of the DevOps process (from source code management to deployment). Moreover, we will also use model-driven techniques to allow users to express their pipelines without the need to know all the implementation details (e.g. configuration files) of all the tools they need to use.

Hi, my name is Hugo da Gião, I am currently doing research at the intersection of DevOps and Model-driven engineering, and i am a researcher at HASLab/INESC TEC. I am also a Ph.D. student in Informatics Engineering at FEUP working on a thesis titled “A Model-driven approach to DevOps” whose end goal is to research methodologies and tools that would allow developers to create different DevOps pipelines without resorting to the use of specific tools. I also did research in the field of visual languages where I worked on creating a visual language to allow non-technical users to solve optimization problems.