Test Automation Helps DevOps Adoption, But Teams Still Struggle with Bugs at Release, Says Survey

A new survey of 500 software and IT professionals, conducted by Atlassian, found that companies implementing devops are seeing mixed results. Insufficient automated test coverage, additional manual processes or a lack of automation in the build/deployment pipeline are key hindrances to devops, with 62% of respondents citing these as the reasons they resort to manual testing. An additional problem is the lack of clarity around metrics of success, with 93% of respondents citing with 93% of respondents citing “customer satisfaction” as the most important metric, but 60% admitting it is difficult to measure customer satisfaction with the newly developed features. The platforms and tooling companies use also impacts their success in implementing devops, accoding to the survey. For example, after deploying a CI/CD platform, 57% of organisations surveyed encountered fewer bugs and outages. Similarly, 47% report making changes and receiving customer feedback faster when using a platform. Adoption of microservices is also a boon to devops, with 71% of respondents using the technique reporting that they find it easier to test and deploy new features. Adoption of devops by itself is not a guarantee of quality, nor speed, it turns out, with 75% of teams facing issues with bugs, defects and delays at release, while 73% report spending 10% to 50% of their time on updates and upgrades to self-hosted software.