DevOps really does speed things up, study shows

The practice of DevOps -- in which developers and operations people collaborate on applications as they are designed, built and tested -- is increasing the speed of software deployments by 20 percent. 

That's the takeaway from a study of 1,300 IT executives and managers, just released by CA Technologies. Respondents with DevOps practices report they have experienced anywhere from a 17 to 23 percent improvement in business in the form of increased revenue, faster time-to-market, improved competitive positioning and enhanced customer experience.  Nearly all respondents recognize a greater need for DevOps strategies now than before.

Organizations with DevOps approaches say they have seen a 22 percent increase in customers and 19 percent increase in revenue as a result of putting the methodology in place.

Two-thirds of the organizations in the survey say they have or are developing DevOps strategies. DevOps isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Developers like to work in unstructured ways with bursts of productivity, while IT operations people are schedule and process-driven.

However, what really matters in the end is the customer, be it an internal group or external consumers. In fact, the need to improve the end-customer experience is the number-one driver of DevOps (cited by 68 percent), followed by the need for greater collaboration between development and operations teams (61 percent). The rise of mobile and cloud -- with their lightening-fast requirements, also are major reasons for DevOps, cited by 52 percent and 43 percent respectively.

IT optimization factors, such as solving for the complexity of IT systems and cost-cutting, are at the bottom of the list (seven percent two percent, respectively).

How do organizations get to DevOps?  IT automation is seen by most as the best route (52 percent), followed by adoption of Agile methodologies (47 percent).