The state of CD among today’s development teams
The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) recently released its 2021 State of Continuous Delivery Report, a study that helps establish baseline continuous delivery metrics. Below, we’ll review some key takeaways from the report and discover mean rates for things like deployment frequencies, recovery times and average lead time for code changes.
Continuous Delivery Statistics
Software performance can be indicative of overall organizational performance. So, how should an organization measure its software delivery success? Well, the book Accelerate outlines four crucial metrics to watch: lead time for changes, deployment frequency, time to restore service and change failure rate. The CDF report establishes current industry averages for three of them.
Deployment frequency
In terms of deployment frequency, the study found that the highest percentage of developers (31.3%) release once per week to once per month. A large percentage of developers, 26.4%, release every month to six months. Only 10.8% of developers are elite performers, releasing multiple times per day. This indicates that rapid release cycles are still maturing across organizations.
Average lead time for changes
The average lead time for changes is more variable than you might think. It takes 28.3% of developers one week to one month to go from committed code to running code successfully in production. For 27.3% of developers, this lead time is increased, from one month to six months. Only 5.74% of developers say it takes less than an hour, indicating that a truly on-demand delivery mechanism remains out of reach at most organizations.
Time to restore service
On the other hand, developers are much quicker to act when it comes to restoring services. The survey showed 34.4% of respondents said it takes them one hour to one day to respond to an unplanned outage. A significant number, 15%, respond to incidents in less than one hour. Still, about 50% of outliers are responding somewhere between one day and more than six months.
Decreasing the mean time to recovery (MTTR) is imperative to respond to broken applications, quickly address security vulnerabilities, and meet evolving customer expectations. As a result, MTTR has become a de facto metric for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to watch closely.
Factors That Affect Software Delivery
Other factors may influence software delivery agility, such as industry type and programming language preferences. Out of the many industries attempting to refine their delivery models, the report highlighted retail as an industry that ranks high in both speed and stability metrics. Other sectors, such as financial services, government and energy ranked high on stability yet received only average scores for speed. Industries like telecommunications received poorer overall scores.
Programming language choices may also dictate overall software delivery performance. The study found that shell scripting languages, Go, JavaScript, PHP and Scala were among the top five programming languages, based on the combined software delivery performance data for organizations using each language.
Continuous delivery is vital to responding quickly to changes and enabling iterative, progressive delivery of new features. Another facet of modern CD that can’t be understated is the widespread prevalence and reliance on open source tools. CDF open source packages like Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Ortelius remain vital to enabling CD processes for numerous developer teams.
CD seeks to make releases regular and predictable events for DevOps staff; and seamless for end-users. DevOps teams at Soutlights can automate CI/CD pipelines to move code through the appropriate environments with no human input, which accelerates the build, test and deployment stages of software development, if your enterprise wants to benefits by this improvements, contact us to work in your project.
Sources: cd.foundation, devops.com
