Most developers at this point in time have adopted DevOps in some form or another, whether they are a full-blown DevOps engineer or a developer utilizing parts of the DevOps practice.
According to a new report from the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), 83% of developers were “involved in DevOps-related activities” in the first quarter of 2024. The report was based on data over the past three and a half years from SlashData. Because of the wide time period being examined, the organization was able to compare this to a 77% involvement in DevOps in early 2022, a 6% increase.
Even though the total number of developers involved in DevOps in some way has risen, there has at the same time been a small decrease in the number of developers who involve themselves in all DevOps-related activities. In other words, developers are specializing on a specific DevOps task rather than trying to do it all. CDF sees this as an indicator of DevOps maturity.
The most common DevOps task developers take on is monitoring software or infrastructure performance, which was done by 33% of developers in the first quarter of the year. Other popular activities include approving code deployments to production (29%), testing applications for security vulnerabilities (29%), and using continuous integration to automatically build and test code changes (29%).
The report also pointed out that there is a strong correlation between the number of tools in use and maturity level. However, there is also a decrease in deployment performance when developers use multiple CI/CD tools of the same type, because it introduces interoperability challenges.
Another indicator of maturity is simply the experience level of the developer. Developers with more than 11 years of experience are twice as likely to be top performers in lead time for code changes, compared to less experienced colleagues. Only 10% of those with 5 or less years of experience are considered to be top performers.
When measuring time to restore services, only 5% of developers with two years or less experience are top performers.
In addition, more experienced developers are more likely to be using more tools. Developers with two or less years experience use an average of 2.3 tools and those with 16 or more years experience use an average of 5.2 tools.
“The CD Foundation has been promoting standards in CD, securing the software supply chain, and advocating for better interoperability,” said Dadisi Sanyika, governing board chair at CDF. “The report findings reflect our community’s ongoing efforts and provide a framework for organizations to compare their practices with those of their industry peers, offering insights into where they stand and highlighting areas that require attention to enhance organizational efficiency.”