2018: Year of Open Source and DevOps

According to the survey conducted by GitLab, “IT organizations that successfully adopt continuous improvement practices and seamless automation across their software development lifecycle will have happier, more collaborative, and well-functioning teams who are better positioned to meet their goals and objectives.”

Methodology

Survey on November 17, 2017, collecting responses until December 18, 2017. During that time, we promoted the survey primarily on GitLab’s social media channels and newsletter. In order to correct for the gender imbalance developing in our survey sample, we made an extra push via Twitter on December 5 to encourage women involved in the software development lifecycle to take the survey. By the end of the open period, we achieved approximately 25 percent female respondents

Demographics

Image from GitLab

Survey Findings

This survey was designed to understand developers' attitudes toward their workplace, discover disparities between developers and their management, and benchmark the state of culture, workflow, and tooling within IT organizations.

• Management

Managers tend to have more of an optimistic perspective on the status of their team’s overall satisfaction, productivity, and the benefits of open source tools. IT leaders plan to invest the most in continuous integration, delivery, and deployment in 2018, and cite selecting the right technology as their greatest challenge.

• DevOps

Commitment to and demand for DevOps is growing, despite challenges posed by outmoded tooling and cultural resistance to change. Adoption is still in early stages, with 23 percent identifying DevOps as their development methodology, but this is sure to increase with IT management naming it as one of their top three areas for technology investment in 2018. Organizations that have adopted DevOps are more likely to deploy on demand and prioritize automation than those practicing Agile.

• Open Source

Open source projects like Kubernetes and CoreOS have gained a lot of recent attention and this year’s survey underscores the value of creating software in the open. 92 percent of total respondents agree that open source tools are important to software innovation and nearly 50 percent report that most of their tools are open source.

• Workflow

While nearly all agree it’s important to work in a collaborative environment and a strong majority (81%) say it’s easy to collaborate with their team and others within their organization, visibility and transparency continues to lag with nearly half of developers (42%) reporting unclear direction as their top challenge to getting work done.
High-performing teams have access to better tools, spend less time context-switching, and are more likely to work remotely than their lower-performing counterparts.

Thanks to GitLab, we can have a better view over the state of developers' opinions about their workplace and IT management in the ever changing technology landscape. "IT organizations that successfully adopt continuous improvement practices and seamless automation across their software development lifecycle will have happier, more collaborative, and well-functioning teams who are better positioned to meet their goals and objectives."

Reference

1. https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/07/2018-global-developer-report/

2. https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/2018/