This article summarizes findings reported by itworldcanada.com from the 2017 State of DevOps Report, published by Puppet in partnership with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA).
Overview: What the 2017 State of DevOps Report Found
The 2017 State of DevOps Report, produced by Puppet in partnership with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and co-sponsored by AWS, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Deloitte, Atlassian, Electric Cloud, Splunk, and Wavefront, surveyed approximately 3,200 professionals to understand what separates high-performing IT organizations from their lower-performing counterparts. The central finding: automation is the defining characteristic of top performers, and the gap between high and low performers is widening.
The Automation Gap Is Growing
According to the report, high-performing organizations have automated 72% of all configuration management processes. This means engineers in these organizations spend significantly less time on manual configuration, delivery, and operations work.
By contrast, low-performing organizations spend close to 46% of their time on manual configuration and related activities — time that could otherwise go toward building features, reducing technical debt, or responding to customer needs.
Nigel Kersten, chief technical strategist at Puppet, framed the problem this way in the report:
“The results of the 2017 State of DevOps Report show that high-performing IT teams are deploying more frequently and recovering faster than ever before, yet the automation gap between high and low performing teams continues to grow. The report will help organizations understand how to identify their own inhibitors and embrace change on their DevOps journey.”
Nigel Kersten, Chief Technical Strategist, Puppet
Performance Metrics: How High Performers Compare
The report quantified the performance differential between high and low performers across four key DevOps metrics:
- Deployment frequency: High performers deploy 46x more frequently than low performers.
- Lead time for changes: High performers achieve 440x faster lead time from code commit to production.
- Mean time to recover (MTTR): High performers recover from incidents 96x faster on average.
- Change failure rate: High performers experience 5x fewer change failures.
The report also found that high-performing organizations were more than twice as likely to report higher quality and quantity of products and services, better operating efficiency, and higher customer satisfaction compared to low performers.
Leadership Is a Critical Factor
The report did not focus solely on tooling and automation. Leadership quality emerged as a significant differentiator for organizations undergoing digital transformation. Among the 3,200 respondents, high-performing organizations were associated with leaders who demonstrated:
- Strong vision
- Inspirational communication
- Intellectual stimulation
- Supportive leadership styles
- Personal recognition of team members
Organizations where these leadership traits were less prevalent tended to be lower performers. This finding reinforces a broader pattern in DevOps research: cultural and organizational factors are as important as technical practices.
Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO of Puppet, summarized the business case for automation and strong leadership:
“By adopting automation and DevOps, our customers have cut software deployment times from months to days, eliminated virtually all configuration errors and most importantly, helped their businesses to become top performers.”
Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO, Puppet
Lean Product Management Accelerates Feedback Loops
For the second consecutive year, the report examined how product management practices upstream affect business outcomes downstream. The finding was consistent: lean product management practices help teams ship features that customers actually want, more frequently.
Faster delivery cycles, in turn, accelerate customer feedback — creating a virtuous loop where teams can validate assumptions, course-correct quickly, and avoid building large amounts of unwanted functionality. This is a core principle of both Lean and Agile development philosophies, and the report’s data provides empirical support for its business value.
Connecting Business Metrics to DevOps Tooling
Steve Brodie, CEO of Electric Cloud (one of the report’s sponsors), highlighted a critical but often overlooked takeaway: the importance of connecting business-level metrics with the tools and processes driving product innovation.
“Electric Cloud’s goal is to enhance visibility and collaboration across DevOps initiatives by helping to automate, orchestrate and analyze all the tools and data sources associated with software pipelines and application releases.”
Steve Brodie, CEO, Electric Cloud
Many organizations adopt DevOps tooling without establishing clear visibility into how those tools affect business outcomes. The report argues that organizations need traceability from pipeline activity all the way through to customer and revenue impact.
Velocity Remains a Core DevOps Metric
The 2017 report reaffirms what earlier editions established: velocity is not just a vanity metric — it is directly tied to business outcomes. Organizations that move faster suffer fewer failures, recover more quickly when problems occur, and are better positioned to respond to market changes. The data supports a counterintuitive conclusion: moving fast, when underpinned by automation and good engineering practice, actually reduces risk rather than increasing it.
Ashish Kuthiala, senior director for DevOps and agile offerings at HPE, reinforced the practical implications:
“At the heart of successful businesses are high-performing teams that evolve and incorporate modern, high-performing applications and processes to drive consistent growth.”
Ashish Kuthiala, Senior Director, DevOps and Agile, HPE
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
- Automate configuration management aggressively. High performers have automated 72% of these processes. If your team is still manually configuring environments or deployments, this is likely your biggest productivity drag.
- Measure what matters. Track deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, and change failure rate. These four metrics (now formalized in the DORA framework) are reliable indicators of overall DevOps health.
- Invest in leadership development alongside tooling. Tools alone do not create high-performing teams. Leadership quality, communication style, and recognition practices matter.
- Adopt lean product management. Short feedback loops between engineering and customers improve product quality and reduce wasted development effort.
- Connect pipeline data to business outcomes. Visibility across the entire software delivery chain — from commit to customer — is essential for making informed investment decisions.
The 2017 State of DevOps Report was produced by Puppet in partnership with DORA. The statistics cited in this article are drawn from reporting on that report. Readers seeking the full methodology and data should consult Puppet’s official publications.