We spoke with a number of professionals to find out what has been successful and what has been a stumbling block in their organization’s journey to DevOps.

Over the last 15 years, we’ve seen DevOps move from idea to practice. DevOps is dedicated to changing the island between development and operations for faster software delivery and greater reliability, and thousands of organizations have successfully implemented DevOps.

While Atlassian has played a part in this shift, we wanted to learn more about DevOps today. In February of this year, we surveyed 500 professionals to assess their success in introducing DevOps into their organizations, the barriers they faced, and the impact of tools and culture on their work.

We identified three major trends and a theme in our survey results. For businesses and organizations, implementing DevOps is a matter of time, not a question of whether or not to implement DevOps, but there are many obstacles and obstacles along the way.

Trend 1: DevOps is now a corporate buzzword

In the same way that Agile started as a popular trend in the early 2000s and evolved into a universal way of working, DevOps has now gone mainstream. Our research shows that 54% of our respondents are companies that have been implementing DevOps for more than three years.

Just as Agile helped organizations respond to changing markets, DevOps can help companies stay competitive as software eats up the world. Respondents generally report that DevOps has had a positive impact on their business, with the biggest benefit being the ability to deliver higher quality deliverables. Forty-nine percent of respondents reported that their transition to DevOps included shorter time to market and more frequent deployments.

DevOps also delivers on the promise of breaking islands and promoting greater collaboration.

After practicing DevOps, nearly half of respondents reported an increase in working with non-technical teams.

To us, this is a clear signal that the DevOps team needs the right tools and practices to collaborate outside of R&D.

Trend 2: Implementing DevOps can be challenging

More than 80% of respondents encountered obstacles in working with DevOps, including everything from traditional infrastructure to corporate culture. This is especially true for DevOps practitioners: developers, IT operations, and site reliability engineers (SRE) who are responsible for deploying tools and practices.

For seemingly simple things like checking the status of a project, 65 percent said they needed to use three or more tools. Still, three quarters of respondents preferred to use the best in class tools for their development efforts.

What do we think?

The problem is not the number of tools. It’s that the tools aren’t better integrated and the people who use them aren’t communicating and collaborating.

DevOps is a logical move, with two-thirds of organizations having a team or job description called “DevOps.” However, simply relabeling a team as “DevOps” or adding more tools without adopting new ways of working is a known anti-pattern.

In addition to tools and positions, DevOps practitioners are required to learn new skills. As organizations move toward DevOps, 78% of respondents say they need to learn new skills along the way, which means that knowledge around core competencies such as CI/CD, Git, and Agile is critical.

Trend 3: DevOps managers and practitioners don’t see eye to eye

There is always a difference between the ideal and the reality. Nearly half of DevOps practitioners say they are unsure how to really improve their organization’s DevOps process.

We found that practitioners place the greatest emphasis on building a strong culture of collaboration as they land DevOps. Policymakers, on the other hand, are more likely to value individual competence. There’s also a forward-thinking way of thinking that thinks agility and speed are the keys to DevOps’ success, not teamwork.

Now, however, the gap is bridging, as organizations begin to recognize what practitioners have always known: 39% of respondents said that having the right people and culture is the primary factor in DevOps success, not the tool.

Learn more about the report

We hope these insights will spark a discussion within the organization and across teams about how best to guide DevOps practices. While there are always new technologies and tools, practitioners (how they collaborate and work) are the cornerstone of an effective DevOps organization.

For Atlassian, we introduced more than a dozen new features that enable automated integration to address some of the issues we discussed during our survey, creating new ways for teams to unify their DevOps efforts and reduce collaboration costs.

Check out the study: https://bit.ly/3je5h49

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