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The 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report

Steve Fenton

Each year at Octopus Deploy, we look forward to the release of the Accelerate State of DevOps Report. The report, from Google Cloud and DORA, is an academically rigorous and long-running research effort, providing crucial insights into the practices and capabilities needed to achieve high performance in software delivery.

From the report, we've learned what combination of technical and cultural techniques drives performance in software delivery and at the organization level. The capabilities and relationships have been analyzed from more than 33,000 survey responses.

We're even more excited than usual this year, as Octopus sponsored the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, published on September 28, 2022.

Background

The Accelerate State of DevOps Report has been running for 8 years, tracking specific practices that predict high software delivery performance and organizational performance. The report establishes links between practices, capabilities, culture, and important outcomes with the goal of being able talk about what tends to be associated with high performing teams and organizations.

The DevOps capabilities work best together, amplifying the positive effects and increasing the cultural and organizational benefits.

In 2021, the key insights included:

  • How culture mitigated burnout
  • Where cloud adoption was a driver for performance
  • How software supply chain security impacts performance
  • How documentation improved security, reliability, and cloud use

The DORA metrics are one of the practical tools to emerge from the report. A 5th metric was added in 2021 for reliability.

Octopus Deploy 2022.3+ includes DevOps Insights for better visibility into your company's DevOps performance, by surfacing data based on the first 4 DORA metrics. Our DevOps Insights reporting helps you qualify the results of your DevOps performance and see where you can improve.

New insights in 2022

As always, the latest Accelerate State of DevOps Report contains new insights, and you'll find several changes in this year's report.

One of the headlines is that one of the biggest predictors for security practices is cultural, not technical. An organization is more likely to adopt appropriate security practices if it has a high-trust/low-blame culture. These practices increase software delivery and operational performance and reduce burnout.

"This year's Accelerate State of DevOps report dug deep on security, and found that the biggest predictor of an organization's application-development security practices was cultural, not technical" said Claire Peters, DORA Research Lead, Google Cloud. "With security top of mind for every organization, we found that teams with high trust and low-blame cultures focused on performance were significantly more likely to successfully adopt effective security practices. It's more obvious than ever that organizational culture and modern development processes are the best place to start for organizations looking to improve their security posture."

There are also insights for:

  • The role of reliability in performance
  • Rates of adoption of cloud technologies
  • A new categorization of respondents into clusters

Thank you

We asked you to participate in the Accelerate State of DevOps survey in some of our newsletters this year. Thank you to everyone who responded and shared their experiences.

You can read the full report here. Check out the DevOps engineer's handbook to learn more about DevOps metrics.

Happy deployments!

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