State of Continuous Delivery Report 2023:
The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance

In this report, commissioned by the CDF and authored by SlashData, we explore the current state of the CD developer ecosystem and how this has evolved over the past year. We look at:

how many developers are involved in the broader DevOps space and work with CD technologies in particular;
how developers’ software delivery performance has changed over time and which factors contribute the most to superior software delivery performance;
which developer segments have experienced the greatest shifts and in which sectors;
how automated security testing impacts software delivery performance;
and which factors contribute to diminished returns from the use of an increased number of hosted CI/CD tools and technologies.

Read the Japanese version of the State of CD Report, translated by The Linux Foundation Japan.

Summary

Some of the key insights from the report are:

Continued increase of DevOps practices adoption; 84% of developers participate in DevOps-related activities
Testing applications for security measures has become the second most popular DevOps-related activity, with 37% of developers actively involved
Using CI/CD tools is correlated with better software delivery performance across all metrics.
While using CI/CD tools can improve development performance, an increasing number of self-hosted CI/CD tools used by DevOps practitioners doesn’t lead to greater performance, possibly due to interoperability issues.

”“The fourth State of Continuous Delivery 2023 Report has encouraging findings, including the increased adoption of CD and DevOps practices, the impacts of use of modern technologies on organizational performance, the importance of introducing the security testing in CI/CD, and the continued emergence of challenges caused by lack of interoperability across different CI/CD tools.”

“The CD Foundation has been spearheading efforts around best practices in CD, securing the software supply chain, and bringing interoperability into the CD ecosystem and the findings in the State of CD Report is a confirmation of our community’s efforts. The report also enables organizations to benchmark themselves against their industry peers so they can analyze and address their efforts to increase organizational performance.”

– Fatih Degirmenci

CD Foundation

In The News

We publish The State of Continuous Delivery Report Series to dive deeper into the data and track the world’s capacity to deliver software with speed and security.

Our report made the headlines again this year!

DevOps.com – CDF Report Reveals Lack of DevOps Maturity
Forbes – Best Of Suite Or Best Of Breed? The Battle Of Convenience Vs. Effectiveness
ITPro Today – CD Foundation State of Continuous Delivery Report Shows Growth in DevOps
iTWire – DevOps observability is the key to unlocking developer velocity
SD Times – Report: Adoption of DevOps practices increasing, while code velocity remains the same
SiliconANGLE – The continuous delivery ecosystem: Interoperability and security take center stage
TFIR – Latest State of CD Report Reveals Continued Increase Of DevOps Practices Adoption

Methodology

The findings in this report are based on data from SlashData’s past six Developer Nation surveys that span the last two and a half years (Q3 2020 to Q1 2023). These are large-scale, online developer surveys that in combination have reached more than 125,000 respondents worldwide. The latest of these surveys, of which data was included for analysis in this report, was designed, produced, and carried out over a period of ten weeks between December 2022 and February 2023.

Previous Reports

If you’re interested in the previous State of CD Reports, you can find them here.

State of Continuous Delivery Report 2023: The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance