  DevOps responds the growing need of companies to streamline the software
development process and, thus, has experienced widespread adoption in the past
years. However, the successful adoption of DevOps requires companies to address
significant cultural and organizational changes. Understanding the
organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps is key,
and comprehending the existing theories and representations of team taxonomies
is critical to guide companies in a more systematic and structured DevOps
adoption process. As there was no unified theory to explain the different
topologies of DevOps teams, in previous work, we built a theory to represent
the organizational structure and characteristics of teams adopting DevOps,
harmonizing the existing knowledge. In this paper, we expand the
theory-building in the context of DevOps Team Taxonomies. Our main
contributions are presenting and executing the Operationalization and Testing
phases for a continuously evolving theory on DevOps team structures. We
operationalize the constructs and propositions that make up our theory to
generate empirically testable hypotheses to confirm or disconfirm the theory.
Specifically, we focus on the research operation side of the theory-research
cycle: identifying propositions, deriving empirical indicators from constructs,
establishing testable hypotheses, and testing them. We performed the
operationalization and testing of the DevOps Team Taxonomies Theory, which
resulted in an empirically verified and trustworthy theory. Our theory has 28
propositions representing this model that map properties to the constructs of
our theory. The operationalization generated 34 testable hypotheses, and we
thoroughly tested 11 of them. The testing has proved the effectiveness of the
theoretical framework, while the operationalization of the constructs has
enhanced the initial framework.
