State of DevOps Report 2023 Highlights

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The Typo Diaries

8 min readJun 21, 2024

This blog was originally published in the Typo blog.

Although we are somewhat late in presenting this summary, the insights from the 2023 State of DevOps Report remain highly relevant and valuable for the industry. The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program has significantly influenced software development practices over the past decade. Each year, the State of DevOps Report provides a detailed analysis of the practices and capabilities that drive success in software delivery, offering benchmarks that teams can use to evaluate their own performance. This blog summarizes the key findings from the 2023 report, incorporates additional data and insights from industry developments, and introduces the role of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) platform as highlighted by Gartner in 2024.

Overview of the 2023 Report

The 2023 State of DevOps Report draws from responses provided by over 36,000 professionals across various industries and organizational sizes. This year’s research emphasizes three primary outcomes:

Organizational Performance: Generating value for customers and the community, extending beyond just revenue metrics.
Team Performance: Evaluating teams’ ability to innovate and collaborate effectively.
Employee Well-being: Assessing the impact of organizational strategies on reducing burnout and enhancing job satisfaction and productivity.

Additionally, the report examines two key performance measures:

Software Delivery Performance: The efficiency and safety of teams in implementing changes in technology systems.
Operational Performance: The reliability and quality of the user experience provided.

Key Takeaways from the Report

Culture Is Critical

The 2023 report highlights the crucial role of culture in developing technical capabilities and driving performance. Teams with a generative culture — characterized by high levels of trust, autonomy, open information flow, and a focus on learning from failures rather than assigning blame — achieve, on average, 30% higher organizational performance. This type of culture is essential for fostering innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Building a successful organizational culture requires a combination of everyday practices and strategic leadership. Practitioners shape culture through their daily actions, promoting collaboration and trust. Transformational leadership is also vital, emphasizing the importance of a supportive environment that encourages experimentation and autonomy.

User-Centric Approach

A significant finding in this year’s report is that a user-centric approach to software development is a strong predictor of organizational performance. Teams with a strong focus on user needs show 40% higher organizational performance and a 20% increase in job satisfaction. Leaders can foster an environment that prioritizes user value by creating incentive structures that reward teams for delivering meaningful user value rather than merely producing features.

Generative AI: Early Stages

An intriguing insight from the report is that the use of Generative AI, such as coding assistants, has not yet shown a significant impact on performance. This is likely because larger enterprises are slower to adopt emerging technologies. However, as adoption increases and more data becomes available, this trend is expected to evolve.

Investing in Technical Capabilities

Investing in technical capabilities like continuous integration and delivery, trunk-based development, and loosely coupled architectures leads to substantial improvements in performance. For example, reducing code review times can improve software delivery performance by up to 50%. High-quality documentation further enhances these technical practices, with trunk-based development showing a 12.8x greater impact on organizational performance when supported by quality documentation.

Cloud Computing Enhances Flexibility

Leveraging cloud platforms significantly enhances flexibility and, consequently, performance. Using a public cloud platform increases infrastructure flexibility by 22% compared to other environments. While multi-cloud strategies also improve flexibility, they can introduce complexity in managing governance, compliance, and risk. To maximize the benefits of cloud computing, organizations should modernize and refactor workloads to exploit the cloud’s flexibility rather than simply migrating existing infrastructure.

Equitable Work Distribution

The report indicates that individuals from underrepresented groups, including women and those who self-describe their gender, experience higher levels of burnout and are more likely to engage in repetitive work. Implementing formal processes to distribute work evenly can help reduce burnout. However, further efforts are needed to extend these benefits to all underrepresented groups.

Flexible Working Arrangements

The Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped working arrangements, with many employees working remotely. About 33% of respondents in this year’s survey work exclusively from home, while 63% work from home more often than an office. Although there is no conclusive evidence that remote work impacts team or organizational performance, flexibility in work arrangements correlates with increased value delivered to users and improved employee well-being. This flexibility also applies to new hires, with no observable increase in performance linked to office-based onboarding.

Actual Practices and Trends in DevOps

The 2023 report highlights several key practices that are driving success in DevOps:

️Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Implementing CI/CD pipelines is essential for automating the integration and delivery process. This practice allows teams to detect issues early, reduce integration problems, and deliver updates more frequently and reliably.

Google: Google has implemented CI/CD pipelines extensively across its development teams. This practice has enabled Google to push thousands of updates daily with minimal disruption. Automated testing and deployment ensure that new code is integrated seamlessly, significantly reducing the risk of integration issues.
Netflix: Known for its high-frequency deployments, Netflix utilizes a CI/CD pipeline that includes automated testing, canary releases, and real-time monitoring. This approach allows Netflix to deliver new features and updates quickly while maintaining high reliability and performance.

️ Trunk-Based Development

This approach involves developers integrating their changes into a shared trunk frequently, reducing the complexity of merging code and improving collaboration. Trunk-based development is linked to faster delivery cycles and higher quality outputs.

Facebook: Facebook employs trunk-based development to streamline code integration. Developers frequently merge their changes into the main branch, reducing merge conflicts and integration pain. This practice supports Facebook’s fast-paced release cycles, enabling frequent updates without compromising stability.
Etsy: Etsy has adopted trunk-based development to foster collaboration and accelerate delivery. By continuously integrating code into the main branch, Etsy’s development teams can quickly address issues and deliver new features, enhancing their agility and responsiveness to market demands.

️Loosely Coupled Architectures

Designing systems as loosely coupled services or microservices helps teams develop, deploy, and scale components independently. This architecture enhances system resilience and flexibility, enabling faster and more reliable updates.

Amazon: Amazon’s architecture is built around microservices, allowing teams to develop, deploy, and scale services independently. This decoupled architecture enhances system resilience and flexibility, enabling Amazon to innovate rapidly and handle high traffic volumes efficiently.
Spotify: Spotify uses microservices to ensure that different parts of its application can be updated independently. This architecture allows Spotify to scale its services globally, providing a reliable and high-quality user experience even during peak usage times.

️Automated Testing

Automated testing is critical for maintaining high-quality code and ensuring that new changes do not introduce defects. This practice supports continuous delivery by providing immediate feedback on code quality.

Microsoft: Microsoft has integrated automated testing into its development pipeline for products like Azure. Automated unit, integration, and end-to-end tests ensure that new code meets quality standards before it is deployed, reducing the risk of defects and improving overall software quality.
Airbnb: Airbnb relies heavily on automated testing to maintain the quality of its platform. By incorporating automated tests into their CI/CD pipeline, Airbnb can rapidly identify and address issues, ensuring that new features are delivered without introducing bugs.

️Monitoring and Observability

Implementing robust monitoring and observability practices allows teams to gain insights into system performance and user behavior. These practices help in quickly identifying and resolving issues, improving system reliability and user satisfaction.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn has developed a comprehensive observability platform that provides real-time insights into system performance and user behavior. This platform helps LinkedIn quickly identify and resolve issues, improving system reliability and enhancing the user experience.
Uber: Uber uses advanced monitoring and observability tools to track the performance of its services. These tools provide detailed metrics and alerts, enabling Uber to proactively manage system health and ensure a seamless experience for users.

️Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Using IaC enables teams to manage and provision infrastructure through code, making the process more efficient, repeatable, and less prone to human error. IaC practices contribute to faster, more consistent deployment of infrastructure resources.

Capital One: Capital One has adopted Infrastructure as Code to automate the provisioning and management of its cloud infrastructure. Using tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform, Capital One ensures consistency, reduces manual errors, and accelerates infrastructure deployment.
Shopify: Shopify employs IaC to manage its infrastructure across multiple cloud providers. This approach allows Shopify to maintain a consistent and repeatable deployment process, supporting rapid scaling and reducing the time required to provision new environments.

The Role of Metrics and Insights

Metrics are vital for guiding teams and driving continuous improvement. However, they should be used to inform and guide rather than set rigid targets, in accordance with Goodhart’s law. Here’s why metrics are crucial:

Promoting Accountability and Transparency: Metrics foster a culture of ownership and responsibility, creating transparency and shared goals within teams.
Enabling Data-Driven Decisions: Metrics provide objective data for evaluating processes, identifying inefficiencies, and implementing improvements.
Facilitating Collaboration and Communication: Shared metrics create a common understanding, making it easier for teams to collaborate effectively.
Supporting Continuous Improvement: Regularly measuring and analyzing performance helps teams identify trends, address inefficiencies, and continuously improve.

SEI Platform as Highlighted by Gartner

The Software Engineering Intelligence(SEI) platforms like Typo , as highlighted in Gartner’s research, plays a pivotal role in advancing DevOps practices. The SEI platform provides tools and frameworks that help organizations assess their software engineering capabilities and identify areas for improvement. This platform emphasizes the importance of integrating DevOps principles into the entire software development lifecycle, from initial planning to deployment and maintenance.

Gartner’s analysis indicates that organizations leveraging the SEI platform see significant improvements in their DevOps maturity, leading to enhanced performance, reduced time to market, and increased customer satisfaction. The platform’s comprehensive approach ensures that DevOps practices are not just implemented but are continuously optimized to meet evolving business needs.

Conclusion

The State of DevOps Report 2023 by DORA offers critical insights into the current state of DevOps, emphasizing the importance of culture, user focus, technical capabilities, cloud flexibility, and equitable work distribution

Download the Report