Most developers at this point have adopted DevOps in some form, whether they are true DevOps engineers or developers using parts of DevOps practices.
According to the 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 from SlashData over the past three and a half years. Due to the long time period being examined, the organization was able to compare this to 77% DevOps involvement in early 2022, an increase of 6%.
Although the total number of developers involved in DevOps has somewhat increased, at the same time there has been a slight decrease in the number of developers involved in all DevOps-related activities. In other words, developers specialize in a particular DevOps task rather than trying to do everything. CDF sees this as an indicator of the maturity of DevOps.
The most common task of DevOps developers is monitoring the performance of software or infrastructure, which 33% of developers did in the first quarter of the year. Other popular activities include approving the deployment of code to production (29%), testing applications for security vulnerabilities (29%), and using continuous integration to automatically build and test code changes (29%).
The report also noted that there is a strong correlation between the number of tools in use and the level of maturity. However, there is also a reduction in deployment performance when developers use multiple CI/CD tools of the same type, as this presents interoperability challenges.
Another indicator of maturity is simply the level of experience of the developer. Developers with more than 11 years of experience are twice as likely to be the best at code change time compared to their less experienced counterparts. Only 10% of those with 5 or less years of experience are considered top performers.
When measuring turnaround time, only 5% of developers with two years of experience or less perform best.
Additionally, more experienced developers are more likely to use multiple tools. Developers with two or fewer years of experience use an average of 2.3 tools, and those with 16 or more years of experience use an average of 5.2 tools.
“The CD Foundation promotes standards in CD, secures the software supply chain, and advocates for better interoperability,” said Dadisi Sanyika, CDF Board Chair. “The report’s findings reflect the ongoing efforts of our community and provide a framework for organizations to benchmark their practices against those of their industry peers, offering insight into where they stand and highlighting areas that require attention to improve organizational effectiveness.”