A survey of 600 IT professionals published this week by mabl, a provider of a test automation platform, finds the biggest barriers to adopting DevOps practices are more closely related to organizational issues rather than any technology.
The survey identified non-technological issues as the main inhibitor to DevOps by a wide margin (82%). Only 11% of respondents said their organizations has fully implemented DevOps practices, while another 24% said they were most of the way toward achieving that goal.
The top two barriers to adoption are slow processes and speed of adaptation (29%), followed by budget and funding (21%). Only 18% identified technology limitations as an issue.
Nearly half of respondents (46%) said they have been able to implement continuous integration, while more than one-third (36%) said they have also been able to achieve continuous delivery. Just over a quarter (27%) said they have also achieved continuous deployment. However, only a third of respondents said they deploy new code at least once per week. Almost half still deploy less than once per month. The number of teams that deploy new code daily or multiple times a day (15%) is roughly equivalent to those that deploy code on a quarterly basis (16%).
The most widely used DevOps tools are GitHub (34%) and Jenkins (33%), followed by GitLab (21%), Azure Pipelines (20%) and Bitbucket (19%).
In terms of testing, the most widely automated tests are user interface (UI)/functional and unit tests at 42% each, followed by regression at 41% and integration at 35%, respectively. The most widely used functional testing tool is Selenium (41%), followed by Cypress at a distant second place (14%). The most widely employed tool for testing application programming interfaces (APIs) is Postman, followed by SoapUI (21%) and homegrown tools (17%).
Dan Belcher, co-founder of mabl, said that while it’s clear most organizations still have a long way to go before they fully embrace DevOps best practices, it’s now more a question of degree rather than if. As organizations realize the extent to which they are dependent on software today, the focus on both quality and ensuring timely delivery will increase. The stakes involved in software delivery these days have never been higher, noted Belcher.
Nevertheless, the survey makes it clear how resistant to change organizations are. Some organizations have been building software the same way for decades. The only thing more difficult than convincing IT and business leaders there is a fundamental need for change is driving that change all the way down to individual developers and IT operations teams.
Competitive pressure, however, will inevitably force the issue. If rivals are delivering better application experiences that create a business advantage within the context of a digital business process, an organization will have to adapt. Otherwise, their fate will be, over time, to fade away or be acquired. Equating DevOps with that existential threat may be a challenge, but unless that connection is made it’s only a matter of time before organizations that aren’t embracing DevOps best practices will slide toward irrelevance.
