Back in late February we launched our latest survey in partnership with Automic. The survey sought to understand how developer tools are selected and used within organizations. We wanted to have some insight into how prevalent Shadow IT was. Well thanks to the hundreds of you who responded, we have been busy working with Automic analyzing the results. Frankly in some areas the responses bore out our original hypothesis, but in other ones the results were pretty surprising.
Not to be a tease, I should tell you we are not releasing the full report and results until our webinar on this on May 4th. You can register for that one here. But let me give you some insight into some of the results:
- A big difference between DevOps empowered organizations versus traditional IT shops. We actually ran the survey to both our DevOps.com audience and then to a general IT control group and had a look at the differences. DevOps empowered groups had far greater insight into what tools were being used, generally used more tools, more open source tools and generally had greater diversity (that they knew about anyway).
- The large majority of respondents reported that their organization use tools besides those on the “approved list”. This is a form of Shadow IT and shows how new software tools are sneaked in under the radar of the official IT.
- Many times these tools that snuck in the back door were eventually adopted as official tools, showing that this is a viable method of introducing new tools into the organization.
- Another insight was whether entire dev teams were using the same toolset. This answer as you might imagine was different when you compared organization sizes. However, overall the message is that developers like to use their chosen tools.
These are just some of the insights we will be discussing at the webinar. Also all attendees will receive a full copy of the report with analysis. So mark your calendars now and register for the webinar where we will discuss these results and more.
BTW, the webinar will feature myself and Kerry Lebel, senior director of community for Automic.
Scott Willson
Scott Willson is Product Marketing Director, Release Automation at Automic Software. He has over 20 years of technology experience that spans software development, pre-sales, post sales, and marketing. Scott is passionate about technology and helping business achieve value through technology and was leading DevOps at organizations before it was coined DevOps.