According to the latest State of Continuous Delivery report from the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the adoption of DevOps is continuing to increase, with 84% of developers participating in DevOps activities in the first quarter of the year.
However, the report also found that code velocity has remained steady for the past two years, with about 15% of teams being considered top performers, meaning they have lead times of less than one day.
The CDF believes that while DevOps may be a help, it is likely the increasing complexity of projects that is slowing things down.
Another finding in the report is that despite the increase in DevOps adoption, there hasn’t been an increase in the number of DevOps-related tools over the last year. The average number of tools sits at 4.5 currently.
However, there is still a strong correlation between the number of tools in place and how likely a team is to be a top performer. These top performers were measured by three metrics: lead time for code changes, deployment frequency, and time to restore service.
The report also found that in general increasing CI/CD tools may increase performance, but interoperability concerns arise when multiple tools are used together.
“We note that the proportion of top performers remains flat while that of low performers increases dramatically, with an increasing number of self-hosted CI/CD tools used. This suggests that there is a diminishing return from increasing the number of CI/CD tools a developer uses. The usage of an increasing number of tools may also be a response to increased complexity, which is having negative impacts on the performance of these developers. Similarly, the integration of multiple tools may not be optimally implemented, leading to function overlap that is impacting performance,” the report states.
The report also shows a correlation between speed and stability metrics. 30% of the highest performers in code change lead time were also the highest performers when it came to service restoration.
Interest in security is also clear from the survey, as testing applications for security measures was done by 37% of developers, rising up to the second most popular DevOps-related activity that teams engage in.
“Developers who perform build-time security checks in an automated and continuous fashion are the most likely to be top performers, and the least likely to be low performers, across all
three metrics, of the types shown,” the report states.
The report was conducted in partnership with SlashData, surveying over 125,000 respondents. It was released during the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit, happening this week in Vancouver, BC. At the event, the CDF also announced the addition of four new members: F5 NGINX, Prodvana, Salesforce, and Testkube.