Agile Business Engineering - From Transformation Towards ContinuousInnovation.

We discuss how to overcome the often fatal impact of violating integral quality constraints: seemingly successful (software) development projects turn into failures because of a mismatch with the business context. We investigate the similarities and differences between the today popular DevOps scenarios for aligning development and operations and the more general alignment problem concerning software and business engineering based on 33 structured expert interviews. It appears that both scenarios are driven by creativity in a continuous collaboration process relying on continuous goal validation. On the other hand, differences appear when considering Thorngate’s trade-off between accuracy, generality and simplicity: the different level of accuracy is the main hurdle for transferring the automation-driven DevOps technology. The paper closes with the hypothesis that this hurdle may be overcome by increasing the accuracy within the business context using domain-specific languages, a hypothesis supported by the interviews that now needs further confirmation via case studies.