Source: digitaljournal.com. Original research: “Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018” by DORA in collaboration with Google Cloud.
Overview
A landmark report published in 2018 by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization — authored by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim — offers one of the most rigorous examinations of DevOps maturity and its economic impact to date. Titled Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018: Strategies for a New Economy, the study aggregates five years of scientific research and more than 30,000 survey responses, conducted in collaboration with Google Cloud.
The report’s central message is that DevOps is not merely an IT methodology — it is becoming a measurable economic driver for organizations worldwide.
DevOps Is Maturing as a Practice
One of the report’s most significant observations is that the DevOps discipline is maturing rapidly. Practitioners are described as “getting better at what they do and pushing the pace for everyone else” — meaning that the performance gap between high-performing and low-performing teams is widening, raising the baseline expectation for the entire industry.
This maturation signals that organizations still operating with siloed development and operations teams face an increasingly steep competitive disadvantage.
Competitive Advantage Through Software Delivery
The report draws a direct line between software delivery performance and business outcomes. Organizations that excel at software delivery are shown to achieve measurable gains across multiple dimensions:
- Increased profitability
- Higher productivity
- Greater market share
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Better ability to achieve organizational goals
This positions DevOps adoption not as an IT cost center decision, but as a strategic business investment with direct revenue and growth implications.
Cloud Infrastructure: Doing It Right Makes All the Difference
The report emphasizes that cloud adoption alone is insufficient — how a team uses the cloud determines performance outcomes. According to the findings, teams that leverage all of cloud computing’s essential characteristics are 23 times more likely to be high performers compared to those who adopt cloud in name only without realizing its architectural benefits.
Dr. Nicole Forsgren summarized this finding directly:
“The data this year is the compelling case of doing cloud right. Adopting essential cloud characteristics drives high performance and differentiates the highest performers from those who may say they are in the cloud, but are unable to realize performance gains because their technology and processes aren’t executed correctly.”
— Dr. Nicole Forsgren, DORA
This is a critical distinction for DevOps and platform engineering teams: migrating workloads to cloud infrastructure without adopting cloud-native design principles — such as on-demand self-service, elasticity, broad network access, resource pooling, and measured service — does not yield the performance improvements that genuine cloud adoption delivers.
Open Source Software and High Performance
The report identifies open source software as another differentiator for top performers. Key findings include:
- High-performing teams are 1.75 times more likely to make extensive use of open source software.
- The same teams are 1.5 times more likely to plan to expand their open source usage in the future.
This correlation suggests that high performers are actively building on the speed, transparency, and community innovation that open source ecosystems offer, rather than relying heavily on proprietary, closed-source tooling.
The Outsourcing Trap
One of the more counterintuitive findings in the report concerns outsourcing. While outsourcing individual functions can reduce costs and provide flexible staffing, the data shows it can actively harm overall software delivery performance when applied at a functional level.
Specifically, low-performing teams are nearly 4 times as likely to outsource entire functions — such as testing or operations — compared to their highest-performing counterparts. Top organizations tend to keep these capabilities in-house, treating them as core competencies rather than commodity services.
The implication for engineering leaders is clear: outsourcing critical DevOps functions may look attractive on a cost spreadsheet but can undermine the feedback loops, shared ownership, and continuous improvement culture that drive long-term performance.
Key Technical Practices That Drive Efficiency
The report highlights several technical practices that consistently correlate with high performance. Teams and organizations looking to improve should prioritize:
- Monitoring and observability: Ensuring systems produce actionable telemetry and that teams can understand system state in production.
- Continuous testing: Automated testing embedded throughout the development pipeline, not just at release gates.
- Database change management: Treating database schema changes as version-controlled, automated deployments rather than manual, high-risk events.
- Shifting security left: Integrating security practices and tooling early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), rather than treating security as a final gate before release.
Why This Research Matters
The DORA 2018 report is significant because it moves DevOps discourse beyond anecdote and vendor marketing. By grounding findings in longitudinal survey data across thousands of organizations and multiple industries, it provides engineering leaders and executives with evidence-based guidance for investment decisions.
For DevOps practitioners, the takeaways are actionable: adopt cloud infrastructure fully rather than superficially, embrace open source tooling, invest in observability and testing, keep critical functions in-house, and treat security as a shared, continuous responsibility. Together, these practices do not just improve deployment frequency or change failure rates — they create measurable competitive and economic advantages at the organizational level.