The 2015 State of Software Delivery - Key Takeaways

Change is hard, especially when it impacts organizational structure, legacy systems and processes. Our third annual software delivery survey reveals that the management of change is a long road as the majority of our respondents continue their implementation of Continuous Integration in 2015.

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Q: What projects did you undertake in 2014?

A: Continuous Integration (48%)

The majority stated that they continued their implementation of continuous integration in 2014. Continued implementation of automated testing came in second at 39%.In our 2014 survey, the #1 response was introducing automated testing at 40%. 

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Q: How do you handle team collaboration and cooperation during the release process?

A: Manual/use email/documents/spreadsheets (63%)

While manual processes grabbed the top slot in our 2015 survey, planning tools like JIRA and Trello came in just under at a whopping 62%. But how is 125% possible? Respondents we able to choose more than one answer per question. What does this tell us? Communication and collaboration amongst teams during the release process remains time consuming and disjointed. While many enterprises are continuing to use traditional communication methods, collaboration tools are on the rise. With the rise in popularity of Hipchat and Slack as well as the continued adoption of JIRA and Trello, teams are finding real world value in the implementation of these organizational tools.

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Q: What are the main factors causing software delivery challenges?

A: Manual steps that result in errors (49%)

Human intervention remains the top culprit for software delivery headaches. Who would have guessed? Everyone. Human error is one of the most costly factors for any business and the rise in automation is of course directly correlated to these numbers. As enterprises begin to require faster software releases and are more complex, automation is the only answer for the future of Continuous Delivery.

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Q: What key metrics have you defined to measure the success of your initiatives?

A: Reduced time to go live (60%)

In 2014 "Reduced rework at handover points" came in as the bigger winner, while sitting in last place in 2015. These result beg the question, are we giving up quality for speed? Or could it be that with the rise of testing automation in 2015, we are seeing higher quality work, allowing us to reduce the time between releases.

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  XebiaLabs promised a $5 donation to The Nature Conservancy for every survey taken. With your help, Xebialabs has been able to donate over $1500 to help fight the tough issues facing our planet today.

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Q: What actions/resources would most help to address project implementation challenges?

A: Education/training  (58%)

Stay in school kids. Whether you want to become the next DevOps thought leader or just a valuable team member when implementing Microservices into your enterprise, education and training are most important. For many of us this means actually attending all of those conference classes instead of skipping out to check out the hotel's new rooftop pool and botanical garden.

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Q: Who are the stakeholders in your delivery process?

A: Development (77%)

But what about the Users! Well they came in 2nd....to last. We're not going to lecture but maybe some Agile/CD Zen Therapy is in order.   Find the entire 2015 State of Software Delivery Infographic, continue learning about DevOps and large enterprise Continuous Delivery processes, or check out our new Periodic Table of DevOps!