The 2019 State of DevOps report highlights practices that contribute to excellence in technology delivery, revealing that elite performers excel in software development and operational capabilities. Key findings indicate that leveraging cloud technology, adopting a culture of psychological safety, and streamlining processes can significantly improve performance and productivity. The report emphasizes the ongoing improvements in the industry, particularly among top performers, and outlines actionable steps for organizations to enhance their DevOps transformation.

1. 2019 - STATE OF DEVOPS REPORT BY GOOGLE CLOUD'S DORA
Results help us understand the practices that lead to excellence in technology delivery and powerful business outcomes.
Leverage the findings of the predictive analysis to identify the specific capabilities organizations can use to improve their SDO performance
Summary
Supporting information search,
Usable deployment toolchains
Reducing technical debt through flexible
architecture, code maintainability and viewable
systems.
1.
2.
3.
Engineering Productivity
initiatives
5 Key Performance metrics Technical Practices
S/w dvlp.
Lead time
Deployment frequency
S/w deploy.
Change failure rate
MTTR
Service Ops.
Availability
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Agility
Stability
IT Promise
Cloud adoption
Organization practices
(including. CAB process)
Culture
1.
2.
3.
accelerates
YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL
IN S/W DEVELOPMENT
SPEED FOR STABILITY
STABILITY FOR SPEED
5 steps to improve your
DevOps transformation
Start with foundations
Adopt a continuous improvement mindset with short and long term measurable
outcomes
Identify your unique constraint (or set of constraints -> constraints are the one
which causes biggest delays, headaches & problems )
Exploit the constraint (by removing your bottleneck, discovering synergeries &
avoiding unnecessary work)
Empower the teams to accomplish the outcomes
Repeat the process
1.
2.
3.
4.
a.
5.
6 Key Findings in
State of DevOps 2019 report
The industry continues to improve, particularly among the elite performers
Delivering software quickly, reliably, and safely is at the heart of technology transformation
and organizational performance
The best strategies for scaling DevOps in organizations focus on structural solutions that build
community
Cloud continues to be a differentiator for elite performers and drives high performance
Productivity can drive improvements in work/life balance and reductions in burnout, and
organizations can make smart investments to support it
There’s a right way to handle the change approval process, and it leads to improvements in
speed and stability and reductions in burnout
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
*SDO stands for Software Development and Operational
drives

2. Elite and High performing organization do well in all 4 SDO aspects and Low. performers worse in all 4 SDO aspects
4 aspects such as Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, MTTR and Change Failure rate
SDO performance
in 2019
DEVOPS CROSSED THE CHASM
Speed enables Stability
Stability enables Speed
Deployment
Frequency
with industry velocity is increasing on Speed & Stability, with shifts to Cloud Computing fueling this acceleration.
Retail industry tops in benefitting over speed and stability; followed by highly regulated industries such as Financial Services and Government
Large enterprises ( esp. >5000 employees) struggle as low performers because of the heavy weight processes
EXCELLENCE IS POSSIBLE Elite performers increased by 20% in 2019 compared to 2018
Aspects of
SDO
Elite Vs Low
performers
Elite
performers
High
performers
Medium
performers
Low
performers
Lead Time
(Commit to Deploy)
MTTR
(Recover from incidents)
Change
Failure Rate
208
times more freq, deploy
106
faster Lead Time
2604
times faster recovery
Ondemand;
multiple deploys/day
< 1 day
< 1 hour
0 - 15%
1/ day - 1/week
1 day - 1 week
< 1 day
1/week - 1/month
1 week - 1 month
< 1 day
7
times low change failure
0 - 15% 0 - 15%
1/month - 1/6 months
1 month - 6 months
< 1 day - 1 month
46 - 60%
Deployment
Frequency
Lead Time
(Commit to Deploy
successfully)
MTTR
(Recover from incidents)
Change
Failure Rate
Elite/Hi. Perf. = 4 deploys / day x 365
Low. Perf. = 7 deploy / year
e.g. CapitalOne deploys 50 times/day; Google, Amazon & Netflix do
1000 deploys/day
Elite Per = 24 hours which has decreased in 2019; in 2018 it was 1 hour.
This is due to heavy weight code review and approval processes that
have become popular in the recent years
} For Elite and Low Performers, MTTR and CFR stayed same as
compared to previous year

3. IMPROVE YOUR SDO PERFORMANCE & PRODUCTIVITY
And deliver value to organization and individuals
Work recovery (leaving work at work)
Reducing burnout
1.
2.
Overlap on the findings show
Invest in the following to increase
Performance & Productivity
IMPROVE SDO PERFORMANCE
3. Culture of psychological safety
4. Code in maintainability
5. Loosely coupled architecture
6. Good tooling
Start with
Basic automation (version control)
Monitoring
Clear change approval processes
Healthy culture
1.
2.
3.
4.
1
Adopt Cloud
Cloud provides flexibility, control, availability +
performance gains
Majority enterprises use Multi-Cloud
How teams implement Cloud matters a lot than
just considering as technology
Essential characteristics of Cloud (by NIST)
Ondemand / self-service
Broad network access
Resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measured service (pay/use)
Data centre is considered as Black Box
because processing/usage and cycle cost
not visible
1.
2.
3.
4.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
i.
2
5. Elite performers meet all the 5 characteristics
24 times higher than Low performers
6. Only if enterprises use all 5 characterisitcs, they
can reap the benefits of Cloud Computing
Adopt practices at team and org. level
3
Organization level
Team level
Both Organization
& team level
Loosely coupled architecture
Clear change process
Code maintainability
Continuous integration
Automated testing
Deployment automation
Monitoring
Trunk-based development
Use of cloud services
Disaster recovery testing
CI platform enables fast feedback on the automated tests.
Automated testing increases ability to fix defects faster
Measure CD based on fast feedback on quality and
deployability
1.
2.
Loosely coupled architecure
4
When delivery teams can independently
test, deploy, and change their systems on
demand without depending on other teams
for additional support, services, resources, or
approvals, and with less back-andforth
communication
Allows teams to quickly deliver value, but it
requires orchestration at a higher level
1.
2.
Code maintainability
5
Provide tools and systems for teams to
manage code well and make it easy for
developers to
change code maintained by other teams
find examples in the codebase
reuse other people’s code
add, upgrade, and migrate to new versions
of dependencies without breaking the
code
1.
a.
b.
c.
d.
*verify various aspects
using/creating latent
constructs

4. IMPROVE YOUR SDO PERFORMANCE & PRODUCTIVITY
And deliver value to organization and individuals
IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY
*verify various aspects
using/creating latent
constructs
Disaster Recovery Testing (DiRT)
Every organization (mission-critical
systems) should have DiRT
3 types of DiRT performed in Prod.
Infrastructure failover (inc. data centre)
Application failover
Simulation/Fault injection into Prod
Remember, DiRT is a means of learning
DiRT helps in practising blameless
postmorterm
1.
2.
a.
b.
c.
3.
4.
6 Change Management
CAB is complex and bureaucratic
2 reasons for this
Need co-ordination amongst teams
Requirement of regulatory control ; esp. in
Financial services, Healthcare & Government; Also
mandated by PCI-DSS and ITSM frameworks for
risk of releases
Introduce Lightweight CAB process
'Shift-left'-peer review based approval during
development process +
Automation can be leveraged
Make CAB process cleared to developers
1.
2.
a.
b.
3.
a.
b.
c.
7 Culture of Psychological safety
Psychological safety = Trust
Trust optimizes information flow,
enhance innovation and creativity,
speaking-up and moderate-risks
1.
a.
8
Improving productivity helps developers and allow
more-time to re-invest in other works such as
Documentation
Refactoring
Doing more of additional features
Build additional infrastructure
Remember, productivity cannot be measured with
metrics such as
Lines of Code
Story Points
Bug closed
1.
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
2.
i.
ii.
iii.
Useful, easy to use tools
Not much focus provided on usability
of tools
Useful (easy access) tools help perform
1.5 times more
Remember, when deciding on tools,
no-golf course purchase
1.
2.
3.
1
Helps save effort for strategic software
development
Freeing up time to spend time on
New development
Refactoring
Design work
Documentation
Gives confidence & reduces stress in
pushing changes
1.
2.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
2 Automation

5. IMPROVE YOUR SDO PERFORMANCE & PRODUCTIVITY
And deliver value to organization and individuals
For more details and explanation on the report and analysis methods ,. please refer to
https://cloud.google.com/devops/state-of-devops/
Internal & External Search
Access to information sources support
productivity
Internal sources (1.73 times more)
Code repositories
ticketing systems
Knowledge Management Database
Online community/forums to get
answered quickly
External sources (1.67 times more)
Stack overflow
Search engines
1.
2.
a.
b.
c.
d.
3.
a.
b.
3 Reduce Technical Debt
Tech. Debt is immature code
Impacts negatively to Productivity
Tech. Debt includes code/systems with
Known bugs that go unfixed in favor of new features
Insufficient test coverage
Problems related to low code quality or poor design
Code or artifacts that aren’t cleaned up when no longer used
Incomplete migration
Obsolete technology
Incomplete or outdated documentation or missing comments
Implementations that the current team doesn’t have expertise in, and
therefore can’t effectively debug or maintain
Create 'Mental Models' (of complete state of system) to reduce Tech. Debt
1.
2.
3.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
4.
4
How do we transform &
scale best practices
Approaches for spreading DevOps practices across the organization
Community of Practice
Bottom-up or Grassroots
Mashup
Proof of Concept as Template
Proof of Concept as Seed
Centre of Excellence
Proof of Concept but stall
Training center (sometimes referred as DOJO)
Big-Bang
Note: i,ii,iii are the strategies used by Elite performers.
1.
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
vi.
vii.
viii.
ix.
Final thoughts
Every decade has its own trendy software methodology. While they all seem to feel better,
history proves them to be ineffective.However, we see continued evidence that DevOps
delivers value, and for six consecutive years, we have statistically verified key capabilities
and practices that help organizations improve their software development and delivery
using DevOps methods.
2. DevOps is not a trend, and will eventually be the standard way of software
development and operations, offering everyone a better quality of life.
1.
Courtesy, Inspiration to the authors of 'Accelerate - State of DevOps 2019' report
Dr. Nicole Forsgren | Dr. Dustin Smith | Jez Humble | Jessie Frazelle