DEVOPSdigest

Winter has turned into spring, and it's time to update my February blog. Last time I had questions. This time I wanted to share a few answers.

EMA analyst Steve Hendrick and I teamed up to explore DevOps realities from multiple dimensions. One of the primary goals was to learn what's true beyond the hype in terms of how DevOps initiatives succeed or fail, who's really involved and why, what activities, best practices, toolsets and technologies are most likely to bring success, and what are the impacts of trends such as cloud, microservices, digital and transformation.

The data was collected largely in March of this year, and we reached across 400 global respondents, with a balance of company sizes skewed to larger enterprises as 63 percent were more had more than 10,000 employees. We learned a great deal and we look forward to sharing many of the highlights with you in our webinar on June 6.

But here I'd like to share just a few observations.

When we asked what's driving DevOps initiatives:

■ Coping with/optimizing cloud opportunities led the list.

■ Speed in updating existing applicationscame in second place, significantly ahead of speed in delivering new applications.

■ Improving OpEx efficiencies across IT also tied with updating existing applicationsfor second place.

The mixture of cloud, speed in delivery and higher levels of efficiency reflected the broader picture of drivers, needs and trends, along with improved customer satisfaction — both external and internal.

When it came to what's going on in terms of DevOps activities:

■ CI/CD and requirements assessmentsled in awareness for lifecycle application activities.

■ While user acceptance testing and performance testing led in terms of defined activities in the DevOps pipeline.

And when we looked at best practicesas applied to DevOps, the top three were Six Sigma, Scrum/span> and ITIL. Yes, ITIL still plays a significant role, especially in helping to unify development and operations teams, as do IT service management (ITSM) teams — especially those evolved enough to reach significantly beyond the service desk.

We looked at roadblocksfrom two perspectives: toolsets and teams. Toolset roadblocksreflected a tie between:

■ Failures to support hybrid team environments

■ Communicating the business impact of IT services to the LOB

Whereas project backlogs in operations was the clear winner when it came to where DevOps teamswere least effective.

But perhaps the biggest news was that there really is consistency — once again as we saw earlier in our "reinventing ITSM" research a definite winner's circle. This was true when we asked about it in terms of:

■ Success in performance, relevance and value

■ Seamless-versus-confrontational interactions between development and operations

■ Progressive-versus-minimal levels of automation and AI/analytics adoptions

■ More automated and agile operations versus the opposite

So what was this winner's circle like?

Well, you may get a few hints from just these four bullets. But to really find out, along with learning many more dimensions behind these and other findings, dial into our webinar on June 6 at 1:00 EDT.