50 percent of all companies struggle to get started with DevOps: Nagarro State-of-DevOps Report 2021

Vienna, November 17, 2021: With the new State of DevOps Report 2021, Nagarro presented the analysis of the results of a survey in which 180 companies participated and anonymously shared their feedback. Today, DevOps is a corporate culture mainstream subject. In the context of lean, agile principles with technical tools and practices, DevOps is an indicator of innovative strength and performance, as the report also confirms.

Survey Findings

Jürgen Pointinger

The survey, designed by DevOps enthusiast and Nagarro Quality DevOps Practice Lead Jürgen Pointinger, combines the methods of the well-known DORA reports with the experience from Nagarro DevOps practice. Around 63 questions were answered by international participants from large companies (65 percent with more than 1000 employees) and SMEs (around 30 percent with more than ten employees). Three-quarters of the respondents operate engineering teams with 5-19 people.

The focus of the evaluation was on culture, organizational and team structures, architecture, automation, testing methods, and cloud. "In summary, we see from the survey that more than two-thirds of respondents are still at the beginning, or in the middle, of their DevOps development. The industry needs a DevOps kickstart," says Jürgen Pointinger.

The complete DevOps Report is available free of charge online: Download the Nagarro DevOps Report 2021 .

Survey details: Few high performers, lots of potential

The criteria defined in the DevOps approach, speed and stability, provide a picture of untapped potential. According to the Nagarro survey, the deployment frequency, the indicator for software renewal, time-to-market, and willingness to experiment, is in the middle range for 28 percent of the respondents. Around 42 percent have either not started at all or are having difficulties doing so. Only 30 percent are high performers in the sense of successful software deployment frequency.

In terms of lead time for change, about 18 percent say they need up to 6 months. About 46 percent of the companies need between one and four weeks to launch a new release in the middle field. "A lot of optimization potential remains untapped here, and time could be saved that would be needed for more experiments," Jürgen Pointinger points out.

Concerning the lack of stability (change fail rate), a critical software quality aspect, about a quarter of the companies show disproportionate failures and complications (more than 15 percent of the releases). Around 65 percent of the companies in the survey stated that they can restore their software within one day (time to restore).

Autonomy, automation and cloud

The Nagarro DevOps Report also paints an interesting picture of current desires in a team and work culture. For example, matters such as the freedom to explore new topics, trust and autonomy in teams, and the desire for time-saving processes are ranked high. About 90 percent are in favor of collective code access and the automated provision of software products. "The survey shows that in high-performing teams, the use of fully automated provision is at 89 percent, and they have a cloud acceptance rate of 100 percent," says the Nagarro DevOps expert.