DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) teamed up with Google Cloud to carry out the survey where it was discovered that the top 20% of firms surveyed could be considered as “elite performers” in the field of DevOps.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren led the report that analysed an incredible 6 years of research in which 31,000 professionals were questioned worldwide.

How companies compare

It was found that the “elite performers” had 208 times more frequent software deployments than the rest of the organisations. Another reason for this group’s success is that they perform multiple deployments on a daily basis as well as regularly deploy on-demand.

It was reported that those coming out on the lower end of the scale reported only deploying around once a month maximum.

The investigators calculated that high performers, who deployed about 4 times a day,  are doing around 1,460 software deployments in a year. Compared to just 7 deployments for lower end performers.

“It’s worth noting that four deploys per day is a conservative estimate when comparing against companies such as CapitalOne that report deploying up to 50 times per day for a product, or companies such as Amazon, Google, and Netflix that deploy thousands of times per day, aggregated over the hundreds of services that comprise their production environments,” Forsgren’s team adds.

As well as this, top companies reported change lead times 106 times faster than low-end performers with lead times of less than a day. Lead times can take up to 6 months for underperformers.

DevOps

Other parts of the research highlighted that smaller organisations are now starting to take a lead in DevOps. Those with 5,000 or more employees are behind those with less than that number in staff.

“Heavyweight process and controls, as well as tightly coupled architectures, are some of the reasons that result in slower speed and the associated instability,” the DORA/Google team states.

What firms can do to reach the top

In order to become successful, researchers in the report claim that companies should:  “Start with foundations: Basic automation (such as version control and automated testing), monitoring, clear change approval processes, and a healthy culture. Then identify your constraints to plan your path forward. This strategy works for those just beginning transformations as well as those who have been optimizing for years. Focus resources on what is currently holding you back, then iterate: Identify constraints and choose the next target.”

They added that companies were successful when the leaders “Empowered teams who make their own decisions about tools and implementations contribute to better software delivery performance,”

The investigators added, “In this year’s research, we see that given the opportunity, high performers choose useful and usable tools, and these kinds of tools improve productivity.”

Employing cloud

Additionally, those teams that employed cloud within their DevOps practices were 24 times more likely to execute cloud capabilities than low performing companies.

Google Cloud and DORA researchers discovered that “In our survey, 80 percent of respondents said the primary application or service they supported was hosted on some kind of cloud platform. Using the NIST framework, we investigated the impact of essential practices on software delivery performance and, for the second year in a row, found that what really matters is how teams implement their cloud services, not just that they are using a cloud technology.”

The post Report reveals DevOps success secrets appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

In the largest and longest-running research of its kind, the report surveyed 31,000 IT professionals over 6 years, analysing the results annually. The report was named Accelerate State of DevOps Report and was conducted by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group, which was acquired by Google in December 2018.

The investigation was sponsored by the software company, Redgate.

Main findings

Key findings from Accelerate highlight the continuous improvements that the DevOps industry is making.  One of which is that 20% of all teams looked at in the report are classified as “elite” performers, up from 7% last year. It was also found that the highest performers are twice as likely to meet work goals, including profitability, productivity and customer satisfaction.

“Over the past six years the Accelerate State of DevOps Report has become the benchmark for good practice in DevOps, demonstrating the business benefits adoption delivers,” says Kendra Little, DevOps Advocate, Redgate Software. “In 2018 it highlighted the importance of the database to DevOps success, and in 2019 has invaluable advice on the impact of good culture, the cloud, creating communities and change approvals on improved organizational performance.”

Improvements to be made

The Accelerate report also researched what companies needed to do in order to improve. It found the main benefit to companies would be to change approval practices. This is because searching for approval for changes from a higher level resulted in a negative software delivery performance. It was also revealed, however, that approving processes are not associated with lower change failure rates.

The findings of the Accelerate report also imply the need for a change in the role of data professionals. To make improvements to the stability of production systems and to increase the performance of the software delivery process, specialists need to move away from the role as ‘gatekeepers’ in the production environment, the report encourages.

It’s further suggested that to deal with these issues, those in specialist roles should transform into consultants and advisors, who can inspire development teams early in the software development lifecycle and create communities at all levels.

The post DORA research reports big improvements in DevOps appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The longest-running research of its kind, the Accelerate report from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) has consistently shown that higher software delivery performance delivers powerful business outcomes.

Interestingly, a new theme in this year’s report was to identify the technical practices that drive higher performance and unlock competitive advantage. They include monitoring and observability, continuous testing, ‘shifting left’ on security and, importantly, database change management.

Software delivery performance

In terms of DevOps itself, the report shows that the highest performing organisations which adopt DevOps release changes 46 times more frequently, have a change failure rate that is 7 times lower, and are able to recover from breaking changes 2,604 times faster.

Crucially, the lead time from committing changes to being able to deploy them is less than one hour in the highest performing organisations – and between one and six months in low performers. Between 46% and 60% of changes deployed by low performers also require some form of hotfix, rollback, or patch.

Database development has entered the picture because deploying changes to the database is often the bottleneck in software development and slows down releases. To address this, the report investigated which database-related practices help when implementing continuous delivery to improve software delivery performance and availability.

Continuous delivery

The results revealed that teams which do continuous delivery well use version control for database changes and manage them in the same way as changes to the application. It also showed that integrating database development into software delivery positively contributes to performance, with changes to the database no longer slowing processes down or causing problems during deployments.

The starting block is communication, cross-team collaboration and visibility, which echoes Redgate’s own 2018 State of Database DevOps Survey earlier in the year. This showed that 76% of developers are now responsible for both application and database development, and 58% reported their development teams and DBAs work on projects together.

“DevOps has become widely accepted in application development and it’s increasingly being recognised that database development can’t be left behind,” comments Stephanie Herr, Database DevOps Product Manager, Redgate.

“Tools are now available that integrate with and plug into the same version control, continuous integration and release management tools used for applications. More importantly, the business case for adopting DevOps for the database has now also been demonstrated.”

Written from press release by Leah Alger

The post DevOps report finds online database development is a key technical practice appeared first on DevOps Online North America.