A survey of 600 software professionals at organizations with more than 1,000 employees published today by OverOps, a provider of software analytics tools, finds the need to ensure quality still trumps the need for speed within most organizations.
According to the survey results, 70% of respondents say quality is their paramount concern and they would rather delay a product road map than risk a critical error impacting their users. More than half of the survey respondents (53%) said they encounter such critical or customer-impacting issues in production at least one or more times a month. Two out of three survey participants report spending at least a day per week troubleshooting issues in their code, with 30% spending anywhere from two days to a full week.
Nevertheless, organizations continue to invest DevOps (58%) to accelerate application development. Among those organizations, continuous integration (54%) and continuous delivery (42%) platforms were the top priority.
Other areas of investment include microservices/containers (45%), static analysis (37%) and dynamic code analysis (27%).
Nearly half of respondents (45%) said pressure to move fast was one of their top software quality challenges. More than half of respondents (59%) said they release new code/features anywhere from bi-weekly to multiple times a day.
Despite investments in DevOps, however, a quarter of participants also said that over 40% of critical production issues are first reported by end users or customers rather than internal systems.
OverOps CTO Tal Weiss said the survey makes it clear there needs to be more focus on software quality. The challenge organizations face is finding a way to achieve that goal while still accelerating the rate at which code is delivered. Too many organizations are measuring the lines of code delivered without taking into account how often they run into issues in production environments because of the quality of the code deployed.
Of course, whenever a project falls behind one of the first places any organization looks to make up ground is by reducing the amount of time allocated to testing. However, many organizations are also integrating testing within CI/CD platforms to make sure critical testing processes are not skipped in the name of making a deadline.
It’s not clear whether software being deployed today is any higher or lower in quality than software developed using legacy waterfall approaches. As long as humans write code, there will always be issues. Proponents of DevOps will argue that deploying smaller amounts of code more frequently helps mitigate that issue. If errors are discovered, it’s easier for DevOps teams to not only roll back that smaller update but also more quickly discover the source of any issue. Sometimes that issue may have more to do with the platform the code is being deployed on than the code itself.
Regardless of the approach to developing software, there is clearly more at stake than ever. As organizations embrace digital business transformation the quality of any software update can have a major impact on the business. The challenge is first eliminating as many of those disruptions as possible and then, secondly, minimizing their potential impact on the business as quickly as possible.
