Progress announced the early-access release of Progress® MarkLogic® Server 12.
The fundamental goal of engineering leaders is to streamline development processes while boosting efficiency and output quality. CircleCI's recent 2024 State of Software Delivery report highlights the practices of elite software delivery teams, in turn providing insights that can help us achieve these objectives.
The report's data analyzes specific developer productivity metrics year over year, including workflow duration, throughput, recovery speed, and success rate. This year, developers routinely met or exceeded the following metrics:
■ Workflow durations at 10 minutes or less
■ Recovery from any failed run occurs in under an hour
■ Success rates hitting above 90% for the default branch of their application
■ Deploying as often as their business requires and at least 1+ times per day
I recently had the opportunity to discuss the report's findings in more detail with the Author, Ron Powell. Here's a roundup of key takeaways from our discussion.
Teams Are More Productive Than Last Year
The report highlights a significant increase in throughput — 11% across all branches and an astounding 68% on production branches — showcasing a heightened focus on delivering new features efficiently.
The ability to deliver rapidly and consistently reflects a commitment to staying at the forefront of development practices. This rise in productivity correlates with adopting advanced CI/CD practices that streamline processes and reduce the overhead associated with deployments.
Recovery Speed Meets Benchmark for the First Time
The median team now recovers from errors in under 60 minutes — meeting the industry-leading standard for the first time in the report's 5 year history. Powell also shared that by reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR), teams have been able to maintain a continuous flow of development and operations, which is crucial for meeting our project timelines and quality standards. This rapid recovery is instrumental in maintaining a seamless development cycle, ensuring that teams can quickly address and rectify issues without significant delays.
Impact of AI Tools
The integration of AI tools has revolutionized traditional development processes, automating routine tasks and offering sophisticated solutions to complex problems. The report's findings suggest that AI tools have played a pivotal role in this year's recorded productivity boost by facilitating more efficient code generation and faster issue resolution. AI has enhanced throughput, but it has also fundamentally changed how we approach problem-solving and innovation in software development, as it requires new skill sets and processes to be used effectively.
A Clear Call to Action
Teams keen on achieving these benchmarks should work on incorporating the following recommendations:
■ Embrace smaller, agile teams: Smaller teams are more nimble and can adapt quickly to changes, a trait that the report identifies as key to high productivity.
■ Integrate robust testing and error reporting: Establishing comprehensive testing protocols and immediate error reporting mechanisms significantly reduces downtime and improves overall code quality.
■ Utilize AI-powered tools effectively: Leverage AI for more than just automating tasks — use it to predict potential issues and optimize processes before they become bottlenecks.
These insights shed light on the evolving dynamics of software development, emphasizing the importance of speed, efficiency, and adaptability. The practical applications discussed highlight a collective move towards more refined, responsive, and robust software development practices. By experimenting with and adopting these strategies, teams can not only improve their performance but also stay competitive in the fast-paced tech landscape.
Industry News
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AI across the hybrid cloud.
Jitterbit announced its unified AI-infused, low-code Harmony platform.
Akuity announced the launch of KubeVision, a feature within the Akuity Platform.
Couchbase announced Capella Free Tier, a free developer environment designed to empower developers to evaluate and explore products and test new features without time constraints.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced the general availability of AWS Parallel Computing Service, a new managed service that helps customers easily set up and manage high performance computing (HPC) clusters so they can run scientific and engineering workloads at virtually any scale on AWS.
Dell Technologies and Red Hat are bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), a foundation model platform built on an AI-optimized operating system that enables users to more seamlessly develop, test and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (gen AI) models, to Dell PowerEdge servers.
Couchbase announced that Couchbase Mobile is generally available with vector search, which makes it possible for customers to offer similarity and hybrid search in their applications on mobile and at the edge.
Seekr announced the launch of SeekrFlow as a complete end-to-end AI platform for training, validating, deploying, and scaling trusted enterprise AI applications through an intuitive and simple to use web user interface (UI).
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. unveiled its innovative Portal designed for both managed security service providers (MSSPs) and distributors.
Couchbase officially launched Capella™ Columnar on AWS, which helps organizations streamline the development of adaptive applications by enabling real-time data analysis alongside operational workloads within a single database platform.
Mend.io unveiled the Mend AppSec Platform, a solution designed to help businesses transform application security programs into proactive programs that reduce application risk.
Elastic announced that it is adding the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL) as an option for users to license the free part of the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code that is available under Server Side Public License 1.0 (SSPL 1.0) and Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2).
Progress announced the latest release of Progress® Semaphore™, its metadata management and semantic AI platform.
Elastic, the Search AI Company, announced the Elasticsearch Open Inference API now integrates with Anthropic, providing developers with seamless access to Anthropic’s Claude, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus, directly from their Anthropic account.