DORA Report: DevOps Maturity Levels Rise

The annual DORA report on DevOps shows a marked increase among Elite performers compared to last year

The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) arm of Google Cloud today published the results of an annual survey that suggests there have been marked gains in the level of DevOps maturity.

The “2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report,” an annual global survey of 31,000 IT professionals, finds 20% of the respondents now consider their organizations to be “Elite” DevOps performers, up from a comparatively paltry 7% a year ago.

The Elite group reported their organizations routinely make multiple code deployments per day. By comparison, low performers reported deploying code somewhere between once per month and once per six months. The normalized annual deployment numbers range from 1,460 deploys per 365 days for the highest performers to seven deploys per year for low performers. Effectively, Elite performers deploy code 208 times more frequently than low performers, according to the DORA report.

The report also finds Elite performers need less than a day of lead time to make a change to an application, compared to 2,555 hours for low performers, and Elite performers reported a change failure rate of 0% to 15%, compared to 46% to 60% for low performers. Finally, elite performers are able to recover from an incident 2,604 times faster than low performers.

Nicole Forsgren, DORA Lead, Research and Strategy at Google Cloud, said the study makes it clear DevOps best practices are now crossing the proverbial chasm in IT. Organizations that are furthest along in making that transition tend to set up “communities of practice” within their organizations through which DevOps best practices are shared across teams, she noted. The DORA report also makes it clear elite performers automate and integrate tools more frequently into their toolchains on almost all dimensions.

Forsgren said the study also makes it clear that the practice of slowing down the rate at which code is developed to achieve higher-quality application deployments is not nearly as effective as employing lighter-weight change processes to lower the amount of code getting deployed at any one time. Slowing down the rate at which code is developed and deployed is not a good strategy, she said, because as the amount of code that needs to get deployed at any time increases, reliance on heavyweight processes to deploy that code usually results in more errors being made. A lighter-weight approach provides the added benefit of reducing the amount of technical debt any organization is likely to incur at any stage of the DevOps process.

The increased rate at which organizations are embracing best DevOps practices naturally coincides with the rise of more complex cloud-native applications. Most of those applications are being built using microservices that create a lot of dependencies within that application environment, with different development teams often working in isolation on specific microservices. The only way to manage that level of complexityeffectively is to embrace DevOps processes, noted Forsgren.

In fact, the DORA report finds Elite performers are 24 times more likely to have met all cloud characteristics as defined by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) than low performers. Organizations that meet all essential cloud characteristics are 2.6 times more likely to be able to estimate the cost to operate software accurately. They also are twice as likely to be able to identify their most operationally expensive applications easily, and 1.65 times as likely to stay under their software operation budget, the study finds.

Clearly, best DevOps practices is one of those rare IT gifts that simply keeps on giving.

— Mike Vizard