Second Annual DevOps Survey Reveals 70% of Engineering Teams Choose Application Quality Over Software Delivery Speed

OverOps State of Software Quality Report Shows Despite Investing in DevOps Tools and Practices, Engineering Teams Still Encounter Frequent Customer-Impacting Errors

SAN FRANCISCO--()--OverOps, the leading continuous reliability solution, today released the results of its 2020 survey report, The State of Software Quality, which found that the overwhelming majority of organizations prioritize quality over speed, yet still experience customer-impacting issues regularly. The report, based on a survey of over 600 software development and delivery professionals, revealed that current DevOps investments are not sufficient for ensuring software reliability, and 2020 plans to invest in new tools like automated code analysis could be the key to solving this challenge.

“The move to DevOps and the increasing velocity at which teams are delivering software is unprecedented. At the same time, they are dealing with much higher levels of risk and vulnerability,” said Herb Krasner, an Advisory Board Member of the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ). “Although the issue of poor-quality software has existed since the dawn of IT, we have reached a turning point where we need to be much more serious about how we address these issues going forward. As such, the results and recommendations from the OverOps State of Software Quality report are important and timely.”

The State of Software Quality survey examined a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from how often organizations encounter customer-impacting issues, to primary areas of DevOps adoption and the top tools participants use or plan to use to address application quality. Key takeaways include:

  1. In the battle between speed and quality, most software professionals choose quality: The survey found that the overwhelming majority (70%) of respondents say quality is paramount, and they would rather delay the product roadmap than risk a critical error impacting their users.
  2. Regardless of whether a team prioritizes speed or quality, they all are encountering frequent production issues: Over half of survey respondents (53%) indicated they encounter critical or customer-impacting issues in production at least one or more times a month. A quarter of participants also said that over 40% of critical production issues are first reported by end users or customers rather than internal mechanisms.
  3. Organizations are moving faster than ever: Continuous Integration (54%) and Continuous Delivery (42%), both hallmarks of accelerated software delivery pipelines, were among the top three areas of DevOps investment for survey respondents. 45% of all respondents said that pressure to move fast was one of their top software quality challenges. Further, over half of respondents (59%) said they release new code/features anywhere from bi-weekly to multiple times a day.
  4. Developer productivity is suffering: As a result of frequent critical production errors, development teams are spending a considerable amount of time troubleshooting code-related issues. Two out of three survey participants report spending at least a day per week troubleshooting issues in their code, with 30% spending anywhere from 2 days to a full week.
  5. Automated code analysis could be the next big thing in software quality: Engineering organizations are expanding the scope of their automation initiatives beyond their CI/CD pipelines. Among the top plans for adoption in 2020 were static analysis (37%) and dynamic code analysis (27%), beaten only by DevOps (58%) and microservices/containers (45%).

Read the full 2020 State of Software Quality report here.

Survey Demographics

The State of Software Quality report is based on a survey of over 600 software professionals ranging from developers and QA to DevOps engineers and IT executives from around the globe. Respondents represented a wide variety of company sizes, from small startups, to enterprise organizations with over 1,000 employees. Participants came from industries like technology, finance, healthcare, media and entertainment, telecom, and the public sector, among others.

To learn more about the results of the survey and how OverOps helps organizations address the speed-stability paradox:

  • Download the full State of Software Quality report.
  • Register to attend our webinar on June 18th for a deeper dive into the key findings with software quality champion Herb Krasner from CISQ.
  • Read our blog highlighting the top three survey findings.

About OverOps

OverOps is a continuous reliability solution that enables companies to ensure rapid code changes do not impact customer experience. Using OverOps, teams can quickly identify, prevent and resolve critical software issues. Unlike static code, log analyzers and APMs that rely on foresight, OverOps analyzes your code at runtime to deliver deep insights into when, where and why code breaks. With robust CI/CD integrations and open APIs, OverOps ensures software reliability from testing to production. The company is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, and has offices in San Francisco, Orlando and Tel Aviv.

Contacts

Scott Lechner
Mindshare PR
scott@mindsharepr.com

Contacts

Scott Lechner
Mindshare PR
scott@mindsharepr.com