Contributed by Steve Fenton, Octopus Deploy
The State of Continuous Delivery Report is commissioned by the Continuous Delivery Foundation and authored by SlashData. It explores the state of CD adoption, technology, and performance in the software industry.
The 2023 report looks at CD through a DevOps lens. It explores the impact of tools and techniques on a team’s ability to deliver frequent high-quality software versions and how well they recover from outages.
Some of the key findings are highlighted below. You can download the report here.
Speed Is Stability
One of the key insights in all State of CD reports is that the link between speed and stability is strong. When you work in small batches and deploy early and often, you’ll also handle outages well. 30% of high-performers for code change lead times were also high-performers for service restoration.
Although this finding was counter-intuitive originally, the relationship is solid. You should be confident that the steps to speed up your CI/CD pipeline will benefit your incident management capability, too.
Shift Left and Automate Security Checks
Security testing is crucial for modern software delivery. Performing automated checks early in the process is the key to development velocity.
Most organizations understand the value of security testing in protecting their reputation. Security testing is now the second most common DevOps activity after monitoring.
Use automated build-time checks to catch security problems early without slowing development velocity.
Beyond Web Applications
Continuous Delivery and DevOps aren’t just for web applications. The report found high adoption rates for DevOps practices across many sectors, such as industrial IoT, embedded software, third-party apps and extensions, and consumer electronics. DevOps activities are also common in teams developing desktop apps, mobile apps, and games.
Teams in these sectors must find ways to minimize disruption, efficiently use resources (such as network and storage), and manage external approvals (like app store checks).
Build Cohesive Toolchains
The report found that using a broad set of DevOps-related technology improved performance. Using a single technology made it more likely for a team to fall within the low-performance group. Teams using 10+ technologies to form a cohesive toolchain were likelier to be in the top-performing group.
The average number of technologies was 4.5, which is below the optimal number found in the report. If you have fewer than 10 technologies, you can look at the software delivery and operations workflows they can support to find gaps.
Do you have tools to assist the following DevOps workflows?
- Work item management
- Source control
- Build and test automation
- Security testing
- Artefact repositories
- Infrastructure as code and configuration management
- Deployment automation
- Monitoring and observability
- Incident management
Where the tools don’t integrate well, they may negatively impact performance. Smooth integration between tools becomes more critical as you add more technologies to your toolchain.
Summary
The 2023 State of CD report confirms many previous findings and explores new ground. The trends since the report began are also a helpful guide to the current challenges in Continuous Delivery and DevOps.
You can find all State of CD reports here: https://cd.foundation/reports/
