Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment team today unveiled its latest annual report on the state of DevOps, with findings that might interest enterprises looking for ways to accelerate software delivery.

DevOps is a philosophy that promotes better communication and collaboration between application development and information technology operations teams, as well as other stakeholders within an organization. In its most narrow interpretation, DevOps describes the adoption of iterative software development, automation and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance. It also covers culture changes, such as building trust and cohesion between developers and systems administrators and aligning technological projects to business requirements.

Dustin Smith, research lead for the DORA team, wrote in a blog post that the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report demonstrates how the methodology is continuing to drive organizational performance in digital transformations.

The report uses four metrics – deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore and change fail rate — to classify DevOps teams as elite, high, medium or low performers.

The report found that elite performers continue to accelerate the pace of software delivery, with lead time for changes decreasing from less than a day in 2020 to less than one hour this year. Elite performers also deploy software updates 973 times more frequently than low performers, have a 6,570-times faster lead time to deploy and a three-times lower change failure rate than low performances.

“Compared to low performers, elite performers are continually able to demonstrate organizational success with DevOps,” Smith wrote.

Smith highlighted a number of trends seen in DevOps over the past year. One of the most interesting ones relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. Google found that DevOps practitioners who stayed home and worked remotely were more likely to experience burnout than those who continued to work in the office. Moreover, more inclusive teams with a “generative culture” were half as likely to experience burnout, the report found.

The suggestion is that “healthy team cultures” help to mitigate burnout problems, Smith said.

DORA has also become convinced that Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps should be seen as complementary philosophies that go hand-in-hand. The report notes SRE techniques such as service-level indicator and service-level objective metrics frameworks provide definitions of practices and tooling that can help enhance DevOps teams’ ability to keep promises consistently to users.

“Teams that prioritize both delivery and operational excellence report the highest organizational performance,” Smith said.

Other important considerations for accelerating DevOps include cloud adoption, with respondents that use hybrid or multicloud software deployments proving 1.6 times more likely to meet their organizational performance targets. A secure software supply chain is also vital, which means security must be integrated at every stage of the software development lifecycle.

Finally, the report stressed the importance of good documentation for successful implementation of DevOps methodologies.

“For the first time, we measured the quality of internal documentation and its effect on other capabilities and practices,” Smith explained. “We found documentation is foundational for successfully implementing DevOps capabilities. Teams with high-quality documentation are 3.8 times more likely to implement security best practices and 2.5 times more likely to fully leverage the cloud to its fullest potential.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Google’s DevOps report always shows some interesting trends, confirming what many knew already: Development teams are under a lot of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Still, the upgrade in skills and proficiency across the board is very encouraging to see,” Mueller said. “It’s also nice to see enterprises upgrading their DevOps processes and employees augmenting their skills. All this is good to know, because faster, easier and more reliable delivery of software remains a paramount objective.”

Image: Google