Survey Results Uncover How the Software Industry Views Continuous Delivery and its Adoption

Launched earlier this year, the goal of this second survey is to understand testing professionals’ strategies, attitudes and pain points with regard to DevOps. Most know the pain points of moving to DevOps, including the fact that moving to DevOps involves getting groups that may not naturally work well together or have the same goals to now work together and towards the same goals. The second is that there will be financial commitments to the tool chain (often a very large commitment to one tool or another) that will also require a great deal of planning, training and culture change.

“Agile and Scrum were concrete processes that led to tangible and positive results in the workplace. On the other hand, I have yet to understand the term “DevOps” except as a meaningless buzzword that has had zero effect to our work processes,” said one survey taker.

Among the key findings a majority 60 percent of respondents that are doing DevOps noted “a lot” of pressure to automate. Of those that aren’t doing DevOps 46 percent also said that there is “a lot more” pressure to automate.

Other findings as stated by the respondents, are:

• Nearly half of the respondents that are practicing DevOps agreed that they have “a lot” of environment or test data problems. The group not doing DevOps/CD has fewer problems in this area. The group practicing DevOps/CD has more and this was an unexpected survey result
• Most respondents know what is ahead in DevOps/CD, even if they have not adopted the practices yet.
• Only 1/3 of respondents that aren’t doing DevOps say their Agile and Scrum practices are in good shape – 67 percent of respondents sometimes or no.
• Since adopting DevOps/CD, over 60 percent of respondents are executing more tests and 32 percent developers are conducting “a lot more tests”.
• 25 percent of respondents said their Ops/IT Team is always helpful to the test team and its needs; 37 percent said Ops regularly helps get good test environments; 27 percent said Ops can be “slow or difficult”.
• The effort required to get customer or production issues fixed and services restored is about the same for DevOps and non-DevOps teams. There are twice as many respondents saying it is “simple, no extra effort” for DevOps teams.

These findings suggest that as more teams practice DevOps, the communication, information, collaboration and training will continue to improve. Automation appears to be leading the way for seamless sharing of data and other information. As both groups said that their automation regression suites are often running “Ok. It has some rough spots, some false negatives and failing tests.” A detailed summary of the results of the first survey can be found in the June 20^th issue of LogiGear Magazine which can viewed at: http://www.logigear.com/magazine/

“DevOps can be a big disruptor, bringing with it a new manner of working, a new set of tools. What most teams want is a smooth running software development pipeline and with DevOps that can take time,” said Michael Hackett, senior vice president, LogiGear. “In fact, at LogiGear we have stopped using the phrase DevOps, and now instead use “Continuous Delivery.” There are many reasons for this. First, Continuous Delivery eliminates the visualization of the big issues that come to mind when thinking of the term DevOps. Second, it seems Continuous Delivery is what software teams really need. Our survey brings insight into the big issues and roadblocks surrounding Continuous Delivery adoption.”

LogiGear’s third survey on automation is currently open for contribution for all software testing and quality professionals at: http://www.logigear.com/test-automation-survey

For additional information on LogiGear’s full range of consulting and training services, visit LogiGear.com.

About LogiGear

LogiGear Corporation (http://www.logigear.com) provides leading-edge software testing technologies and expertise, along with software development services that enable companies to accelerate business growth while having confidence in the software they deliver. Founded in 1994 by top thought leaders in the software testing industry, LogiGear has completed software testing and development projects for prominent companies across a broad range of industries and technologies.