The Data: More DevOps Tools are Better

The State of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Report (April 2024) put out by the CD Foundation is a good read, you should go get it. What caught my eye this time around was the finding that using more tools is correlated with higher DevOps performance using DORA metrics.

As the number of DevOps technologies employed moves from one or two (typically source control and issue tracking) towards ten the likelihood of being a low performer (the red line) decreases and the green high performer line tics up.

Why are more tools helpful?

Each DevOps technology tends to be complimentary to the next. Streamlining CI/CD will enable faster builds and deployments which reduces friction. However, if testing is still slow, most organizations will wait on that testing or security scans rather than deploy unchecked builds to production. As testing speeds up, the risk of production change becomes increasing important and automatic release verification, observability and feature toggles all become barriers.

Each new technology helps move things forward and moves the risk or velocity bottleneck elsewhere, to be addressed by another tool.

What about all-in-one platforms?

All in one DevOps platforms like Harness or GitLab are still attractive. The questions point to technologies like "Do you use continuous integration tools?" and would be answered yes many times for an all-in-one platform.

In fact, it's likely the positive impact of many technologies that has driven the growth of the all-in-one approach. Each tool is useful and drives us forward, but if every tool needs to be integrated to others, the integration effort may grow geometrically. An answer to that is to look to integrated platforms that provide many of the DevOps technologies we need in a pre-integrated format.

Correlation and Causation

It's worth noting here that organizations that don't value rapid delivery and production uptime are less likely to implement DevOps technologies. The kinds of organizations that will seek to be high performers by these metrics are going to be the ones to implement DevOps tooling. While it is reasonable to expect that the tooling helps, some of this correlation may be "teams that go faster get more DevOps tools" rather than "Teams that get more DevOps tools go fast."

Takeaway

DevOps remains a team sport. This is true for the people involved as well as the tooling. That we have accelerated from annual releases to shipping many times a week or even many times a day is the result of dedicated engineering, modernized organization structures, and yes... implementing a bunch of awesome tools.