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The State of DevOps Report 2019 Is Out

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The Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 is out like every other year. Now, let’s talk about the key findings of this year’s survey:

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  • The Industry Continues to Improve, Particularly Among the Elite Performers: Proportion of high performers have tripled, now comprising 20% of all teams. This shows the improvement is real for those who really are doing the right things.
  • Delivering Software Quickly, Reliably and Safely Is at the Heart of Technology Transformation and Organizational Performance: It is evident that speed, stability and availability leads to organizational performance in terms of profitability, productivity and customer satisfaction.
  • The Best Strategies for Scaling DevOps in Organizations Focus on Structural Solutions that Build Community: High performers favor strategies that create community structures at both high and low levels of organization. Having established community of practices, having proof of concepts, helps them become more resilient and successful. Dojos are becoming more and more important.
  • Cloud Continues to Be a Differentiator for Elite Performers, and Drives High Performance: The use of cloud as defined by NIST Special Publication 800–145, is predictive of software delivery performance and availability. High performers are 24 times more likely to execute all five capabilities of cloud computing:
    1. On demand self-service
    2. Broad network access
    3. Resource pooling
    4. Rapid elasticity
    5. Measured service
  • Productivity Can Drive Improvements in Work/Life Balance and Reduction in Burnout, and Organization Can Make Smart Investment to Support It: To support productivity, organizations can foster a culture of psychological safety and make smart investments in tooling, information search and reducing technical debts through flexible, extensible and viewable systems.
  • There Is a Right Way to Handle the Change Approval Process, and It Leads to Improvements in Speed and Stability and Reductions in Burnouts: Heavy weight change approval processes such as CAB, negatively impact speed and stability. In contrast, having a clearly understood process for changes drives speed and stability, as well as reduction in burnouts. It is nice to see ITIL 4 has adopted this best practice, and the CAB there is no longer mandatory.

The study was done on varied departments and industries.

Software Delivery and Operational (SDO) Performance

Over the last 6 years, a set of key metrics has been developed to measure SDO performance which provides a high-level system view of software delivery and performance and predict an organization’s ability to achieve goals. Last year, one operational metrics were added and found this measure helps delivering superior outcomes.

This puts the focus and proves operational performance adds to the overall performance of the organization and helps in achieving the outcomes. Availability becomes an important component to recognize the outcome and co-create value. In ITIL 4 we also find this being brought out in the Service Value System. Importance of operations in adopting DevOps is very important.

The SDO for Elite Performers as per the Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019

This year the report has shown two research models to help drive improvement in both improvement in performance and productivity.

Use of cloud has been one important factor. How it is used leads to the benefit generated out of it.

The Five Essential Characteristics of Cloud-Related Result:

Only 29% of the respondents who said they use cloud infrastructure agreed or strongly agreed they met all the five essential characteristics of cloud computing as defined by NIST.

The report talks about technical practices.

Executing for maximum effect:

  • Concurrent efforts at team and organization levels
  • Continuous delivery using automation
  • Team-level technical capabilities
  • Organization-level technical capabilities

Factors within are:

Importance of architecture still remains important at organization level. Relook at the change process, it’s an important point highlighted in this year’s report. Use of cloud services is giving more improvement. DR testing is as critical as any other testing.

Change management needs to be tuned to facilitate continuous delivery. It should not be heavyweight and on the other hand do not compromise risk. Points to be looked at in change management are:

  1. Implementing segregation of duty
  • Use Version Control
  • Use Infrastructure as Code
  1. Role of CAB becomes more strategic
  • Helping teams to implement capabilities that improve performance by providing guidance and resource
  • Weigh important business decisions that require a trade-off or sign-off at higher levels of the business
  • Shifting detailed code review to practitioners and automation and providing more time for strategic decisions to leadership
  • Transition from gatekeeper to process architect and information beacon
  1. Clear change process with proper delegation of authority

Psychological safety helps in improvement of performance.

This report talks about improving productivity. How do we improve productivity? The following factors can help:

  • Useful and easy-to-use tools
  • Technical professionals and tools
  • Internal and external search
  • Technical debts

Finally, the approaches to improve–heatmap of DevOps transformation strategies by performance profile.

Learn more about the Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 and attend the DevOps India Summit 2019 to hear the global experts.

— Niladri Choudhuri

AWS/Accenture Pulsemeter