Open source software development trumps all others

Johannesburg, 01 Oct 2018

Open source success.

Open source users are more likely to achieve all-round success in software development as opposed to developers who don't use open source.

Other findings in the report include:

Software delivery and availability unlock competitive advantages such as increased profitability, productivity, market share, customer satisfaction, and the ability to achieve organisational goals.
The utilisation of cloud infrastructure, improved software delivery performance, and high performers are 23 times more likely to leverage all cloud computing's essential characteristics.
Outsourcing functions such as testing or operations hurt performance, and low performers are almost four times more likely to outsource those functions than high performers.

That's one of the findings of a recent survey aimed at evaluating the current state of the growing DevOps industry undertaken by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in collaboration with Google Cloud.

Some 30 000 respondents participated in the survey, the results of which have been published in the 2018 Accelerated State of DevOps Report.

According to DORA, DevOps is not a software development methodology or technique but rather a software engineering culture and practice that is aimed at unifying software development (Dev) and software operations (Ops).

Organisational performance

Based on its analysis of the respondents' input, DORA concluded that implementing DevOps practices and capabilities during technology transformation paid off in terms of organisational performance, as well as quality outcomes, and open source software is playing an increasingly important role in this.

The survey revealed that nearly 60% of respondents make extensive use of open source components, libraries and platforms, with half indicating that their use of open source software was likely to increase in the future.

Interestingly, respondents identified as 'elite' performers were 1.75 times more likely to make extensive use of open source components, libraries and platforms than low performers. Elite performers were also 1.5 times more likely to expand their use of open source software.

Four key performance characteristics

The survey evaluated four key performance characteristics to determine whether respondents could be characterised as elite, high, medium or low performers: deployment frequency; lead time for changes; time to restore service; and change failure rate.

Elite performers were able to deploy code on-demand, multiple times a day, while low performers were only able to deploy code between once a week and once a month.

The lead time for changes to the primary application or service worked on was less than one hour for elite performers, and between one and six months for lower performers, while the time taken to restore the primary application or service worked on after unexpected service incident such as an outage was between one week and one month for low performers compared to less than one hour for their elite counterparts.

Finally, while between 0% and 15% of the applications or services worked on within elite performing organisations would require subsequent remediation, the almost half, between 46% and 60% within low performers would need to be reworked.