“This year’s Global DevSecOps Survey shows that there are more successful DevOps practitioners than ever before and they report dramatically faster release times, truly continuous integration/deployment, and progress made toward shifting both test and security left,” said Sid Sijbrandij, CEO and co-founder at GitLab. “That said, there is still significant work to be done, particularly in the areas of testing and security. We look forward to seeing improvements in collaboration and testing across teams as they adjust to utilizing new technologies and job roles become more fluid.”
It’s a changing world for developer, operations and security teams and that holds true for roles and responsibilities as well as technology choices that improve DevOps practices and speed up release cycles. When done right, DevOps can go a long way to improve a business’s bottom line, but there are still obstacles to overcome to achieve true DevSecOps.
The Changing Role of the Developer
Every company is now a software company and to drive business results, it is even more critical for teams to understand how the role of the developer is evolving – and how it impacts security, operations and test teams’ responsibilities. GitLab found that the lines are blurring between developers and operations teams as 35% of developers say they define and/or create the infrastructure their app runs on and 14% actually monitor and respond to that infrastructure – a role traditionally held by operations. Additionally, over 18% of developers instrument code for production monitoring, while 12% serve as an escalation point when there are incidents.
DevOps adoption rates are also up – 25% of companies are in the DevOps “sweet spot” of three to five years of practice while another 37% are well on their way, with between one and three years of experience under their belts. As part of this implementation, many are also seeing the benefits of continuous deployment: nearly 60% deploy multiple times a day, once a day or once every few days (up from 45% last year). As more teams become more accustomed to using DevOps in their work, roles across software development teams are starting to shift as responsibilities begin to overlap. 70% of operations professionals report that developers can provision their own environments, which is a sign of shifting responsibilities brought on by new processes and changing technologies.
Snapshot of GitLab’s global results include:
Changing role of developer
- GitLab found that the lines are blurring between developers and operations teams as 35% of developers say they define and/or create the infrastructure their app runs on and 14% actually monitor and respond to that infrastructure – a role traditionally held by operations
Security: who is responsible?
- More than 25% of developers reported feeling solely responsible for security, compared to testers (23%) and operations professionals (21%).
- For security teams, more clarity is needed – 50% of security team members said they owned security, and 50% said everyone should be responsible.
Speed:
- GitLab found that nearly 83% of developers report being able to release code more quickly after adopting DevOps.
- Testing has emerged as the top bottleneck for the second year in a row, according to 47% of respondents
- Nearly 60% of companies deploy multiple times a day, once a day, or once every few days (up from 45% last year).
Download the survey report here
