DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) Announces the 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- DevOps Research and Assessment (https://devops-research.com/), pioneers in helping organizations achieve high performance by leveraging technology - including building faster, more secure, and more resilient systems - today announced it has launched their latest report "Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018: Strategies for a New Economy" in collaboration with Google Cloud https://cloudplatformonline.com/2018-state-of-devops.html. Nearly 1,900 technical professionals worldwide participated in this year's study, contributing to research findings that drive excellence in the industry and allow organizations to generate powerful business outcomes by leveraging technology.

"Our research provides compelling evidence that smart investments in technology, process, and culture drive profit, quality, and customer outcomes that are important for organizations to stay competitive and relevant -- both today and as we look to the future," said Dr. Nicole Forsgren, co-founder and CEO of DORA. "A stunning finding in the data this year is the compelling case of doing cloud right. Adopting essential cloud characteristics drives high performance and differentiates the highest performers from those who may say they are in the cloud, but are unable to realize performance gains because their technology and processes aren't executed correctly."

"Our goal at Google Cloud is to take the best practices from what we've learned running multiple billion-user products, and make that information broadly accessible to teams everywhere," said Melody Meckfessel, VP of engineering at Google. "By collaborating with DORA on this report, we're furthering that goal by giving the developer and operator communities new insights into the current state of the industry. These insights can help teams understand and apply best practices of high performers, such as how to increase agility and efficiency without sacrificing security or stability."

This year's Report found key findings in the areas of:

• Software delivery and availability unlocks competitive advantages. Those include increased profitability, productivity, market share, customer satisfaction, and the ability to achieve organization goals.
• How you implement cloud infrastructure matters. The cloud improves software delivery performance but teams that leverage all of cloud computing's essential characteristics are 23 times more likely to be high performers.
• Open source software improves performance. Open source software is 1.75 times more likely to be extensively used by the highest performers, who are also 1.5 times more likely to expand open source usage in future.
• Outsourcing by function is rarely adopted by elite performers and hurts performance. While outsourcing can save money and provide a flexible labor pool, low-performing teams are almost 4 times as likely to outsource whole functions such as testing or operations than their highest-performing counterparts.
• Key technical practices drive high performance. These include monitoring and observability, continuous testing, database change management, and integrating security earlier in the software development process.
• Industry doesn't matter when it comes to achieving high performance for software delivery. We find high performers in both non-regulated and highly regulated industries alike.
• And so much more!

Additional sponsors of the report include: Amazon Web Services, CA Technologies, CloudBees, Datical, Deloitte, Electric Cloud, GitLab, IT Revolution, Microsoft, PagerDuty, Pivotal, Redgate, Sumo Logic, Tricentis, and XebiaLabs.

Supporting Quotes:

"Key results from the report show that companies are continuing to grow their DevOps practices while expanding their use of open source and hybrid Cloud infrastructures," said Ashok Reddy, group general manager, DevOps, CA Technologies. "As companies optimize and excel in their use of DevOps, CA is committed to delivering a full range of capabilities across all platforms that help customers integrate security early in the development process, and use monitoring, observability and continuous testing to positively drive continuous delivery for unparalleled customer experiences."

"As leaders in the DevOps industry, we are excited to support The State of DevOps Survey this year," said Andre Pino, vice president of marketing, CloudBees. "The survey results show the positive impact that continuous delivery and DevOps are having on organizations of all sizes. Our products incorporate some of the key metrics and best practices from the survey findings and enable our customers to directly link their DevOps initiatives to business value returned from those initiatives."

"Data is at the heart of every organization – it's the most valuable asset. As we see in this report, database deployments are a barrier to achieving DevOps goals and challenge an organization's ability to accelerate application releases," said Derek Hutson, CEO of Datical. "Organizations must address the need to automate the database release process earlier as they define their release automation strategy. The report findings show database changes are often a major source of risk and delay when performing deployments, and as demands for quicker and more frequent application releases continue to rise, we simply cannot afford to ignore this bottleneck anymore. As DevOps professionals, we need to continue to innovate and deliver better experiences for our customers, which means including the database in the overall application release strategy from day one."

"The annual State of DevOps Report reinforces the importance of learning how to deliver technology differently in today's world—from how you utilize open source to implementing cloud to best practices around testing, change management and security," said Bill Briggs, Global CTO of Deloitte Consulting LLP. "Incorporating DevOps is becoming a mandate if you want to improve performance, productivity, and value."

"With so many organizations now making 'big bets' on DevOps to help them remain competitive, the 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps survey is an incredible resource to help teams understand where and how to invest their time and energy," said Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud. "We are proud to support DORA and our strategic advisors Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim, and are pleased to see that our approach to enabling continuous delivery, self-service practices, and driving more effective cloud adoption aligns with the core practices found in high- and elite-performing organizations."

"At Microsoft, we feel privileged to have sponsored the 2018 State of DevOps Report. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This research identifies the factors that can help empower every team to deliver better software."
- Sam Guckenheimer, Product Owner, Visual Studio Team Services

"It should be no surprise that high performing DevOps teams are a key differentiator and measure of real success for companies undergoing digital transformation," said Ophir Ronen, Director of Digital Operations Insights at PagerDuty. "The key takeaways from DORA's annual report reinforces PagerDuty's belief that digital operations maturity is fundamental to a company's business success. PagerDuty has found that software delivery performance is directly tied to the maturity and operations health of DevOps teams. The rich findings from the report align with PagerDuty's proprietary operations health management service and operations maturity model which powers high performing DevOps organizations."

"Everyday we see organizations wondering how to deliver software faster and reduce costs. Pivotal's customers know that the only way to go fast forever is to make meaningful changes to how they build and operate software. The analysis provided by the 2018 State of DevOps Report reinforces that belief, showing the tangible benefits that high-performing teams see as a result."
- Ian Andrews, VP of Product at Pivotal

"Redgate has been helping clients to introduce DevOps for the database for the last three years," says Mary Robbins, DevOps Marketing Manager at Redgate. "It's good to know that the latest Accelerate: State of DevOps report from DORA shows that integrating database work into software delivery positively contributes to performance. It matches the findings from our own State of Database DevOps research and demonstrates the database is now a partner in development, rather than an add-on."

"This report clearly shows that high team performance is attainable, and the key characteristics to focus on. In particular, it shows that the top performing teams adopt the best the cloud has to offer as well invest in robust monitoring and observability capabilities," said Ben Newton, Director of Product Marketing for Sumo Logic. "Sumo Logic is committed to helping our customers empower their teams to leverage the power of the cloud and easily monitor and secure their modern applications, so that they can focus on delivering more value to the business and becoming elite DevOps teams."

"It's great to see that the Accelerate State of DevOps report has started researching how testing impacts DevOps adoption and success," says Tricentis founder and Chief Strategy Officer Wolfgang Platz. "For years, manual testing has been dominating testing processes—with even best-in-class organizations achieving test automation rates of 18%. As organizations evolve to DevOps, they must also evolve their end-to-end testing processes.  This is critical for realizing DevOps' full potential in terms of speed and agility. "

"A clear takeaway from this year's report is that continuous delivery positively affects performance but requires a broad set of technical practices," said Rob Stroud, XebiaLabs Chief Product Officer. "In addition to making a cultural transformation, successful DevOps teams integrate their tools, processes, and people into a standardized and automated software delivery practice, from ideation to deployment. Small teams often start with a few tools in isolation, and after the first few apps, look for ways to connect them into a full end-to-end continuous delivery pipeline that's scalable. Today's DevOps platforms, such as XebiaLabs', are designed for just that—to bring people, tools, and processes together and deliver a fully visible, manageable, compliant, and scalable continuous delivery process."

Additional Resources:

• Access DORA's Research and Publications (https://devops-research.com/research.html)
• The DevOps Assessment from DORA (https://devops-research.com/assessment.html)

About DORA
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), founded by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim conducts research into understanding high performance in the context of software development and the factors that predict it. DORA's research over five years and more than 30,000 data points serves as the basis for a set of evidence-based tools for evaluating and benchmarking technology organizations. Learn more at devops-research.com.

Media Contact:
Jeremy Douglas
Catapult PR-IR
303-581-7760
[email protected]

SOURCE DevOps Research and Assessment

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