DevOps Practice Falls Short Of Its Promise

The lag in DevOps adoption, apart from negatively impacting the developer experience, poses a threat to the business. The efficient delivery of valuable software remains a differentiating, competitive advantage. Without a full commitment to DevOps principles and relevant metrics, not only will developer teams struggle to demonstrate the value they deliver, they will also struggle to improve their performance. The good news is, the path to DevOps maturity is clear and achieving this maturity is one critical way for businesses to separate themselves from the competition.

The survey looked at where development teams find themselves today; how they describe the methods they employ; the challenges they face; the state of their interactions with the business; and where they should focus attention to put DevOps on a firm foundation and improve the developer experience within an organization.

Key findings from the report include:

• Fewer than 20 percent of respondents said that their development team was able to choose its own tech stack; 44 percent said they are partly able to and 38 percent they are not able to at all. Flexibility around choice of tools is a central component of DevOps culture because it enables organizations to react more quickly to changing customer and business needs.
• Only 20 percent of respondents indicate that they use a Value Stream Management (VSM) platform to track engineering efficiency and tie development activities to actual business results.
• When it comes to DevOps maturity, nearly 60 percent said that they are flexible in adapting to changing customer needs and have CI/CD pipelines set up. At the same time, less than half of engineers build/ship/own their code or work on teams based on team topologies, indicating a lack of DevOps maturity.
• Over 70 percent of respondents track open support tickets as a measure of customer value. While this metric is easily accessible, it provides limited insight into developer impact. Measures like feature adoption, churn, ROI, or NPS are better, however, fewer than half of those surveyed actually use those metrics.