The rate at which software gets deployed in organizations is speeding up quickly, as even the lowest-performing organizations are now fielding new applications at a rate of about once a week to once a month, up from once every month to six months a year ago.

That’s according to information technology automation software provider Puppet Inc.’s 2017 State of DevOps report. DevOps is an emerging method of application development that blends tasks performed by a company’s application development and systems operations teams.

Puppet lumped organizations into one of three performance categories based on how often they were able to deploy new code and how resilient their IT systems are to failure and other changes.

The company found that teams with the “least transformative” leaders were about half as likely to be “high performers” as those with the “most transformative” leaders. Puppet defines “transformative leaders” as individuals who can motivate employees to achieve higher performance and also possess characteristics such as communication, vision and offer “personal recognition” of their underling’s work.

Puppet’s report was sponsored by several companies with a clear stake in DevOps, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., VMware Inc., Splunk Inc. and Electric Cloud Inc. It surveyed 3,200 IT professionals, developers and executives to produce its findings.

The most encouraging news, from the perspective of DevOps advocates, is that the gap between low-performing and high-performing organizations is narrowing, though the gap is still wide. The highest-performing organizations deploy new code only 46 times more often than the lowest-performing firms, compared to 200 times more often a year ago.

Another interesting finding is that higher-performing organizations have automated 72 percent of their configuration management processes. As a result, those high performers spend just 28 percent of their time dealing with the manual configuration of processes, which stall innovation and deployments. Low-performing organizations, on the other hand, spend almost half of their time on manual configuration.

Higher-performing teams also recovered from failures much faster than low-performing teams. Puppet said this was likely because low-performing teams spend fewer hours at the keyboard putting out quality code, which means they need more time to fix things when they break.

“High performers understand that they don’t have to trade speed for stability or vice versa, because by building quality in, they get both,” the researchers wrote.

Image: Puppet