Incident Management in a Software-Defined Business: A Case Study

Abstract

Context: An incident management process is necessary in businesses that depend strongly on software and services. A proper process is essential to guarantee that incidents are well-handled, especially in a software-defined financial services company needing to adhere to guidelines and regulations.

Objective: This paper aims to improve the understanding of the current state of practice through a case study of the incident management process on a software-defined company.

Method: We conduct a single-case exploratory case study by interviewing 15 subject matter experts on how tools are used, the challenges experienced and the future opportunities of the process. The findings are triangulated with documentation and data.

Results: We make nine core observations in this paper. Certain tools are prescribed to teams to be used in the incident management process, complemented with flexible support for diverse tooling that aid teams in handling incidents. Core challenges include monitoring data quality, the complexity of the environment, and the balance between minimising incident resolution time and following procedural guidelines. Future opportunities can lessen these challenges by making better use of available tooling and employing machine learning approaches. This requires tight supervision on the use of best practices and good monitoring data quality.

Conclusion: The tools, challenges, and future opportunities for incident management in software-defined businesses identified in this paper call for a strengthened focus on improving the quality of monitoring data, handling environment complexity, issue clustering, and better support for regulatory compliance.