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Agile is King, But Continuous Integration is an Elusive Goal

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A recent survey led by Dimensional Research on the testing trends in modern development teams shows that agile methods are widely adopted, whereas only a few organizations reported the ability to deploy on a hourly-basis, an increasing goal amongst the respondents.

It’s rather common to see this sentence in the topics’ related sites:

It's not continuous delivery if you can't deploy right now!

Although 89% of the organizations reported the adoption of an agile development methodology, compared to 82% reported two years ago, the results on the ability to deploy often are quite different.

As mentioned by Charles Babcock in his article:

Continuous integration with an ability to deploy hourly, often described as an end goal of adopting an agile development process, was cited by 28% as the destination they were shooting for. However, only 14% were actually doing so. Hourly continuous integration a year ago was a goal for only 18%. The added 10% a year late shows how quickly continuous integration is rising in the consciousness of development staffs. It's rising faster than the actual ability to deploy, currently at 14%, but a year ago a similar Dimension Labs survey showed it to be 10%.

The results in the report show a “notable improvement” in the past year in the time it takes to deploy a new build. When asked “how often does your team typically deploy a new build?”, the interviewees answered that:

  • 14% deploy on an hourly basis
  • 34% deploy once a day
  • 21% deploy weekly and 31% deploy less often than weekly

It is worth mentioning that more organizations want to deploy more frequently and less organizations are willing to maintain long deployment cycles.

Devops adoption, often seen as a needed step to improve the ability the deliver faster - amongst other set of advantages - was reported as being in progress / in consideration for 88% of the organizations and only a few reported not having plans to adopt DevOps (6%), or not even considering it (6%).

A total of 732 individuals participated in the survey. Participants included a variety of roles, company sizes, industries and regions. The report was performed by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Sauce Labs.

 

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