DevOps has been a way of life for big tech and software companies. But now, it is gaining notable traction among corporate IT organizations. Organizations need to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of software development and IT operations. Once believed to only be useful for large development teams, DevOps can provide increased speed and efficiency, flexibility, adaptability, security integration, and customer satisfaction for enterprises of all sizes.
As shown in Figure 2 from our full report, DevOps Best Practices, the number of organizations practicing DevOps rose in 2021 after remaining flat in the prior two years. In 2022, there was a significant spike, and this upward trend continued into 2023, with an 80% practice rate. This represents a notable 34 percentage point increase over five years.
DevOps is an organizational model that promotes collaboration between software developers and IT operations. It is a natural extension of agile development into the deployment and operational phases of the systems life cycle. Just as agile development builds software in small, iterative build cycles, DevOps applies enhancements as small incremental changes committed daily, hourly, or even moment-by-moment into the production system.
“For many organizations, there is a desire to marry software development to IT operations for continuous software delivery—DevOps promises just that,” said Waynelle John, research analyst for Avasant Research, based in Los Angeles. “With the growing interest for automation in IT departments, we anticipate this practice will continue gaining popularity.”
Traditional software change management processes treat development, testing, and deployment as discrete steps carried out by different IT organizational units. Software developers build a new system release, while another group is responsible for testing or ensuring quality assurance. Subsequently, the operations group applies the new release to the production environment. Typically, there are checklists and approvals at each step, and the whole process can take months or even years. Under DevOps, developers are empowered to build, test, and commit small changes directly into the production environment. New releases are rolled out incrementally as a series of smaller changes that can be implemented quicker than the traditional model.
However, based on the data collected in our IT Management Best Practices study, DevOps still has room for improvement. Some IT organizations still do not see the need for integrating it into their work processes or there may be barriers to implementation. Furthermore, DevOps requires a culture change due to differences between developers and IT operations personnel. For DevOps to be successful, the silos between developers and operations personnel must be broken down, essentially joining these two functions at the hip. Do not treat DevOps simply as a technological challenge but recognize the organizational and cultural changes that will be required.
In our full report, we look at adoption trends and maturity of DevOps by organization size and sector. We conclude with practical recommendations for establishing formal and consistent DevOps practices.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our study, DevOps Best Practices. The full report is available at no charge for subscribers, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing)