Over 9,000 people from over 100 countries participated in the 2014 State of DevOps Report conducted by Puppet Labs, IT Revolution Press and ThoughtWorks. Much like we saw in 2013, there is a common acceleration of DevOps within IT organizations but this latest report dives a bit deeper and illustrates a clear impact that acceleration is having on the enterprise.
A number of findings from 2013 were re-confirmed including the frequency of application deployment and lower failure rates found amongst high-performing organizations. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the additional questions that support the statement that IT is not just a cost center, it's a source of profitability, an opportunity for greater market share and a threat to the competition.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are both earmarked as best practices that correlate most strongly to high IT performance. You can read the entire report yourself here but here are some findings that stuck out to me:
- "IT performance and well-know DevOps practices, such as those that enable continuous delivery, are predictive of organizational performance."
- "It’s not dev versus ops, it’s dev plus ops. When the outcome of a dev and ops interaction is win-win, IT performance wins."
- "Companies with high IT performance are twice as likely to exceed their profitability, market share and productivity goals."
- "Developers breaking large features into small incremental changes and merging their code daily into trunk are strongly correlated with both IT and organizational performance."
- "Continuous improvement and learning is what sets successful companies apart, enabling them to innovate, get ahead of the competition — and win."
Want to learn more about continuous delivery and DevOps? Download this research paper conducted by EMA for Ten Factors Shaping the Future of Application Delivery. Download it here.