More firms are planning, adopting and successfully implementing DevOps - research

Computing's in-depth research shows that organisations are taking DevOps more seriously than last year

There has been an increase in the number of companies who are either planning to move towards a DevOps way of working, are in the process of merging both functions, or have already merged both functions successfully, according to Computing's in-depth research.

DevOps is the integration of developers who build and test IT services, with the teams that are responsible for deploying and maintaining IT operations. Many organisations have adopted a DevOps culture in a bid to help their teams to deliver software faster.

In an online survey Computing asked senior IT professionals whether they had adopted, or were planning to adopt, a DevOps structure in any part of their organisations. We asked the same question in a survey 12 months earlier.

There was an increase in the number of respondents who had started to merge both functions (16 per cent in 2015 compared to 25 per cent in 2016), and for those who had merged both functions successfully (10 per cent in 2015 and 13 per cent in 2016).

In the 2015 survey, 13 per cent of IT professionals said that DevOps was in the planning stages, and this increased by seven percentage points to 20 per cent of overall respondents this year.

Meanwhile last year 28 per cent of respondents said that they were thinking about adopting a DevOps structure but weren't sure what the benefits were. This figure dropped to 21 per cent in 2016.

In both years, the same number of respondents (four per cent) said they had merged both functions but that the process was painful. Betfair's eight-year quest to perfect DevOps is an example of how companies may have to try varying interpretations of DevOps before arriving at a setup that works well for the organisation.

DevOps is also becoming a more widely understood term - with only six per cent of respondents stating that they didn't know what the term meant (down from 13 per cent in 2015).

This has also perhaps had an effect on the proportion of respondents who believe that DevOps is not applicable to their organisation. Only 11 per cent said that DevOps was not applicable to their organisation in 2016, down from 16 per cent in 2015.

Computing's in-depth research included interviews in person and over the phone with IT practitioners and a nationwide, online quantitative study completed by in excess of 270 IT decision-makers representing organisations from numerous industries including banking and finance, technology, healthcare, education and media.

For the full results of Computing's research and to hear how companies are adopting DevOps, come along to Computing's DevOps Summit on 5 July in London. It's free for end users.