Over the last six months, we’ve asked teams and individual contributors to assess their DevOps platform practices by answering a 20-question quiz. To date, more than 600 people have shared their experiences, providing a clear, and somewhat surprising, snapshot of DevOps as it’s done today. There are obvious technical wins, of course, but there are also glimpses of how DevOps and modern software development are driving business change.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
DevOps is a stand up (and out) choice
Almost 35% of respondents say they’ve been doing DevOps for between one and three years, while 22% report they’ve been at DevOps less than a year. And 16% are in that DevOps sweet spot of between three and five years, while 15% are seasoned DevOps pros with more than five years of experience.
DevOps, of course, enables faster and safer software development and it’s clearly taking teams and entire organizations along for the ride, with much greater levels of collaboration/planning and a commitment to cross-functional processes. Nearly one-quarter of respondents say everyone in their organization considers themselves to be part of the DevOps team. And 17% say security, test, and design have joined dev and ops to create their DevOps teams.
Big changes are happening within those teams as well. Just shy of 30% say the traditional roles of “dev” and “ops” are definitely blurring and 16% report everyone on their team is “cross-functional”. Nearly 15% say dev, sec, ops, and test are all seeing roles change and blend together.
When asked how teams handle planning and collaboration, 50% say their processes were either “long-established and effective” or “completely seamless and baked into everything.” Meanwhile, 43% are either just starting a planning/collaboration process or are well underway.
To put it another way, it appears DevOps drives faster releases and better planning and collaboration almost in equal measure.
A DevOps platform in 2022
Just shy of 36% of quiz takers use an “out of the box” DevOps platform, while only 7% are considering one. Nearly one-third of respondents say their DevOps platform is a “hybrid” affair of homegrown and purchased solutions, or what GitLab refers to as [DIY DevOps](/blog/2021/08/03/welcome-to-the-devops-platform-era/#phase-3
