The focus of the 2019 GitLab Developer Survey was DevOps. It attracted responses from over 4,000 software professionals across various industries, roles, and geographic locations and here are some of its findings.

Announcing the survey results, Suri Patel notes:

According to our survey respondents, the primary mission for all software professionals today is improvement. Everyone wants more secure code, increased visibility, reduced cycle times, and continuous deployment, but how do teams get there? Based on our survey results, DevOps done right can help realize these goals. 

The demographics show that nearly half the respondents work the computer industry and almost all of them as members of software development teams:

In terms of geography 54% were in Europe and Russia, 27% in North America and 10% in Asia. Looking at gender 91% were male, 6% female.

Turning to the use of DevOps practices these two charts summarize the state of affairs:

Scrum and Kanban emerged as the most prevalent development methodologies, with DevOps practiced by 36%, leaving Waterfall used by only 17%. However only 28% of respondents rated their DevOps implementations as good while 33% opted for “fair” and 17% called them “poor.”

The survey also looked into source control, finding an overwhelming 95% used Git, followed in second place by Subversion at 2%. When it came to continuous integration and build tools the results were perhaps skewed by the fact that  60% of the survey takers were GitLab users:

Continuous delivery is a cornerstone of DevOps and in this respect the survey found impressive achievement with 43% of respondents claiming that their organizations continuously deploy (meaning on-demand deployment and/or multiple deployments a day) and 41% said deployments happen between once a day and once a month:

Commenting on these results the report states:

The benefits of continuous delivery are clear: Developers say product/project managers are 25% more likely to have a better sense of dev team capacity in a CD organization than in a company that deploys between once a month and once every six months. And 47% agree those same managers are in a better position to accurately plan and scope features in a CD environment.

In a seasoned DevOps environment, developers are 1.4x more likely to feel innovative and they’re also more connected to other teams: 89% say they’re more likely to have visibility into what others are working on.

One headline finding of the survey is that working remotely really works for software developers. GitLab itself is an "all remote company" and 20% of respondents work entirely or mostly remotely. 

The report concludes:

[Remote} developers say they’re 23% more likely to be aware of what other colleagues are working on despite not being physically present in an office. Their managers aren’t out of the loop either – 21% of developers said their project/product managers understand the capacity of the different developers working for them and because of that are 27% more likely to plan and scope features.

Picking up on key issues discussed in the report it states:

Mostly remote teams are 23% more likely to have mature security practices than primarily office-based teams, and leadership is 57% more likely to see performance clearly.

More Information

GitLab Report

2019 Global Developer Report (pdf)

Related Articles

Appian Survey Reveals Satisfaction With Low Code 

GitLab Goes Serverless  

Survey Reveals JavaScript Trends 

The State of Agile 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info