DEVOPSdigest

Organizations that are actively managing the quality of open source components flowing into production applications are realizing a 28 percent improvement in developer productivity, a 30 percent reduction in overall development costs, and a 48 percent increase in application quality, according to the 2017 State of the Software Supply Chain Report from Sonatype.

Furthermore, analysis of more than 17,000 applications reveals that applications built by teams utilizing automated governance tools reduced the percentage of defective components by 63 percent.

Conversely, organizations failing to manage software supply chains are unwittingly releasing vulnerable applications into production, wasting thousands of hours on rework and bug fixes, and facing increased liability due to gross negligence.

Additional key findings of the 2017 State of the Software Supply Chain report include:

Consumption of open source components is growing on a massive scale

■ Year-over-year downloads of Java components grew 68 percent (52 billion in 2016), JavaScript downloads grew 262 percent (59 billion in 2016), and demand for Docker components is expected to grow 100 percent (12 billion downloads).

■ Faced with a near infinite supply of open source components, high-functioning DevOps organizations are utilizing machine automation to govern the quality of open source components flowing through their software supply chains.

Open source component suppliers remain slow to fix vulnerabilities

■ Even when vulnerabilities are known, OSS projects are slow to remediate - if they do so at all. Only 15.8 percent of OSS projects actively fix vulnerabilities, and even then the mean time to remediation was 233 days.

■ This puts the onus on DevOps organizations to actively govern which OSS projects they work with, and which components they ultimately consume.

Number of downloaded components with known vulnerabilities is slightly decreasing

■ In 2016, the percent of Java components downloaded from the Central Repository that contained known security vulnerabilities fell to 5.5 percent (1 in 18), down from 6.1 percent the year prior.  

■ Although this defect download ratio is far from perfect, there is empirical evidence that hygiene is beginning to improve with ratios declining slightly in each of the last three years.

The regulatory landscape is rapidly changing

■ In the past year in the United States, the White House, four federal agencies, and the automotive industry have released new guidelines to improve the quality, safety, and security of software supply chains.

Wayne Jackson, CEO, Sonatype, said: “Companies are no longer building software applications from scratch, they are manufacturing them as fast as they can using an infinite supply of open source component parts. However, many still rely on manual and time consuming governance and security practices instead of embracing DevOps-native automation. Our research continues to show that development teams managing trusted software supply chains are dramatically improving quality and productivity.”

Methodology: The 2017 State of the Software Supply Chain Report blends a broad set of public and proprietary data with expert research and analysis. This year’s report extends beyond Java data to include supply chain findings from JavaScript, NuGet, Python, and Docker ecosystems.