Hey everyone 
I’m sharing here the key finding of the 2021 State of DevOps Report and my main takeaways.
As usual, the report includes an updated benchmark of the Accelerate key metrics:
Other topics that captured my attention:
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The emergence of Reliability as the 5th Accelerate key metric:
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“The fifth metric [reliability] represents operational performance and is (…) the degree to which a team can keep promises and assertions about the software they operate.”
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“We found evidence that teams who excel at SRE practices are 1.4 times more likely to report greater performance, and 1.8 times more likely to report better business outcomes.”
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Practices that had the most impact in predicting better reliability outcomes:
- Define reliability in terms of user-facing behavior
- Use automation to reduce manual work and disruptive alerts
- Define protocols and preparedness drills for incident response
- Use a shared responsibility model of operations
- Incorporate reliability principles throughout the software delivery lifecycle - “shift left on reliability”
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Evidence that reliability is linked to open source technologies adoption:
- “Elite performers who meet their reliability targets are 2.4 times more likely to leverage open source technologies.”
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Return of the investment in DevOps impacting companies’ time-to-market:
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“For the first time, our high and elite performers make up two-thirds of respondents.”
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“This year’s elite performers have (…) decreased their lead time for changes when compared to previous assessments.”
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The impact of technical documentation is overlooked:
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“We found that (…) teams with higher quality documentation are 2.4 times more likely to see better software delivery performance. Teams with good documentation deliver software faster and more reliably than those with poor documentation.”
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Practices that had the most impact in predicting better documentation quality:
- Document critical use cases for your products and services
- Create clear guidelines for updating and editing existing documentation
- Define owners
- Include documentation as part of the software development process
- Recognize documentation work during performance reviews
and promotions - Training on how to write and maintain documentation
- Automated testing for code samples or incomplete documentation
- Guidelines, such as documentation style guides and guides for writing for a global audience
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Shifting-left security linked to business success:
- “In addition to exhibiting high delivery and operational performance, teams who integrate security practices throughout their development process are 1.6 times more likely to meet or exceed their organizational goals. Development teams that embrace security see significant value driven to the business.”
There’s a lot more to unpack from the report, but these are my takeaways.
What did you find most interesting?