ZeroTurnaround’s Rebel Labs recently release ‘The IT Ops & DevOps Productivity’ report which surveyed the day-to-day activities, key processes, tools, & challenges of 620 engineers. The report unveils some surprising facts regarding the IT Ops/DevOps community, with the stats to back them up.

Here are the key finds of the report:

As compared to traditional IT Ops teams, DevOps teams:

• Waste less time on communication
• Spend less time ‘firefighting’
• Spend less time on administrative support
• Claim less work hours per week
• Spend fewer days working after-hours
• Spend more time on positive/neutral tasks, than IT Ops teams

The entire report is divided into 4 major parts; week-long grind, failures and recoveries, tools of choice, and releasing software.

Let’s dig deeper into the results.

When asked how both teams spend their time each week, Rebel Labs found that DevOps oriented teams spend more time automating repetitive tasks, infrastructure improvements & self education, whereas traditional IT Ops teams spend more time in. firefighting, support, communication, which is a real turn down.

Part 2 of report suggests that 40% of traditional IT Ops teams require more than one hour to fully recover from a failure, while only 22% of DevOps oriented teams require that much time. This means that DevOps teams are nearly 2 times more likely to recover from a failure in less than 10 minutes.

DevOps teams try to pre-design apps and automate as much as possible, and prefer using “infrastructure as code” tools like Puppet, Chef and others. When it comes to release automation, only 1 in 8 respondents have fully-automated processes, and semi-automation still holds the dominant position.

While all these figures are good, the painful side is that in 16% of cases, deployments happen during weekend nights. And there are much frequent releases! But if take a look at the bigger picture, it is definitely good to practice DevOps as it not only reduces delivery times but also allow DevOps teams spend ample time on learning and improvement.