A new 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps Report published today by Google Cloud's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team reveals how tech organizations can drive higher performance through improvements to culture, processes and technologies.
The report summarizes findings from DORA's annual survey of over 36,000 IT professionals worldwide. It tracks critical metrics like deployment frequency, change lead time, change failure rate and recovery time from failures.
While around a third of respondents have achieved on demand deployment capacity and maintain low change failure rates, only 18 percent realize lead times under a day and a mere 17 percent can recover from failures within an hour – pointing to considerable room for enhancing software delivery performance.
In fact, nearly two-thirds of deployments still demand some degree of remediation, an area many DevOps teams need to address. DORA developer advocate Nathen Harvey notes high-quality documentation, though often overlooked or under-prioritized, can substantially boost team performance by up to 25 percent.
Additionally, the report finds public cloud usage increases infrastructure flexibility by 22 percent, which in turn lifts organizational performance by 30 percent. However, it cautions that simply shifting workloads to the cloud provides mixed benefits at best. The research advises thoughtful, innovative cloud utilization focused on expanding flexibility.
It also indicates artificial intelligence for automating DevOps workflows offers advantages, though remains early in enterprise adoption. As AI capabilities progress, it may transform DevOps management to smoothly coordinate expanding codebases and accelerate change integration.
Presently however, as developer productivity grows, so do code volumes, overtaxing pipeline orchestration. More organizations now leverage platform engineering strategies to centralize complex, large-scale DevOps workflows. In the short term, driving developer productivity may temporarily increase burnout risks as code proliferation outpaces maturation of management practices. Longer term however, combining maturing AI automation and platform engineering could significantly improve future survey findings.
For now though, persistent issues like lagging developer productivity continue burdening many DevOps teams, despite having pipelines implemented. The report counsels emphasizing sustainable productivity gains over chasing metrics alone.
Critically, the research finds inclusion and generative cultures where teams feel psychologically safe to creatively experiment perform 30 percent better. Additionally, equitable work distribution helps mitigate burnout.
While advancing AI adoption and platform engineering evolution may transform future DevOps management, cultural evolution and sustainable process improvements remain vital for performance gains today.
This invaluable roadmap helps technology leaders drive substantial improvements in organizational performance through cultural transformation, enhanced cross-team collaboration, and focused advancement of both skills and technologies.
Source: Google Could State of Devops Report
