What Does “CIOs Get Strategic as IT Budgets Stay Flat” Mean?

1. Flat or Modestly Growing Budgets
   Many organizations are seeing IT budgets grow at best in the single-digit percentages—or even remain flat. For instance, Forrester data indicates over 90% of IT decision-makers expect only single-digit increases, with about 9% projecting stagnant or shrinking budgets (CIO, MRC Productivity).
   In healthcare, CIOs are often working with IT allocations of under 5% of net patient revenue—a tough constraint (CereCore Resources).
2. Tight Scrutiny from Finance & Boards
   Every IT dollar now must justify itself. Gartner reports that while budgets are growing around 5%, CFOs are demanding clear ROI for every major expenditure (Heinsohn, Medium). This means no more blanket approvals—every project must tie directly to business outcomes.
3. Shift from Cost Center to Strategic Partner
   The era of CIOs merely “keeping the lights on” is ending. Now, they’re expected to shape business strategy—driving revenue growth, innovation, and risk mitigation—all under budget pressure (Thriveon Blog).

How CIOs Are Responding Strategically

Here’s how CIOs are stepping up in this constrained environment:

1. Prioritizing High-Impact Areas

• AI & Automation as Strategic Levers
  Investments in AI and automation are increasingly resilient—even in tight budgets. IDC projects AI spending growing at a 19% CAGR through 2026 because it delivers productivity gains and opens new business value (Medium, CIO).
  Healthcare CIOs, for instance, are ranking AI as their top lever for driving cost savings in 2026 (CereCore Resources).

2. Emphasizing Cost and Portfolio Optimization

• CIOs are ruthlessly identifying inefficiencies—especially cloud “sprawl”—and eliminating redundant services, underused licenses, or unnecessary maintenance costs to free up funds for innovation (CIO).
• Strategic portfolio reviews help shift spending from purely operational (“run”) needs toward transformative (“change”) investments, even when overall budgets stay flat (Service Industry Association).

3. Leveraging Partnerships and External Talent

• With hiring constraints and limited budgets, CIOs are outsourcing specialized functions. In healthcare, 66% of CIOs reported using contractors for short-term projects; 45% are outsourcing parts of IT operations (CereCore Resources).

4. Investing in Financial Transparency & Data-Driven Decisions

• Advanced IT financial management tools give CIOs real-time visibility into where every dollar is going. This helps align spending with strategic goals, and aids in scenario planning or reporting to executives (CIO Index).
• Clear ROI reporting and predictive modeling help justify investments—even without budget increases.

5. Balancing “Run, Grow, Transform” (RGT) Strategically

• Using Gartner’s RGT model, CIOs aim to reduce the proportion of budget spent on maintenance (“run”) and shift investment toward innovation (“grow” or “transform”)—even if total IT spend remains flat (Service Industry Association).

At-a-Glance: Strategic Actions in a Flat Budget World

Bottom Line

The phrase “CIOs get strategic as IT budgets stay flat” captures a fundamental shift in the CIO role:

• From steward of IT costs
• To architect of business value—even when budgets don’t grow

That means focusing on high-ROI areas like AI, streamlining operations, leaning on partnerships, and aligning every spend with clear business outcomes.

PractiTest, a test management platform provider, published a report today that suggests professional application testers have become more adept at working within DevOps workflows.

The annual survey of more than 1,000 application testing professionals finds that 80% of all application testing within organizations is being done by test engineers, test leads, testers and automation testers. A full 92% of survey respondents also noted they are working within the context of an agile methodology, while 42% cited DevOps specifically. Half of respondents said they work within the framework of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

Significantly, more than half of respondents (59%) said testing is shifting left within their organization, but only a third (33%) said programmers participate in the testing process.

PractiTest CEO Yaniv Iny said that level of DevOps inclusion suggests that, rather than shifting testing completely left on to the shoulders of application developers, a more nuanced approach to application testing is taking hold as professional testers learn to work within the sprints that make up a DevOps workflow. A full 90% of respondents said testing has become more automated within their quality assurance (QA) processes.

By now, most application testers have come to terms with automation and, increasingly, AI, said Iny. The assumption now is that large swaths of the testing process will be automated, Iny added. A full 97% of respondents said that functional testing automation was either important or very important for them to succeed, while 96% said test automation patterns, principles and practices are also critical.

Usage of behavior-driven development (BDD) as a testing model has also increased, with 27% of organizations now employing it to go beyond simply testing functions.

However, the survey also found that, instead of automation decreasing the size of testing teams, those teams are getting larger. The number of organizations with 16 or more testers increased by 10% to 34% compared to a year ago. That suggests organizations are launching either more complex application development projects or launching multiple projects at the same time as they embrace digital business transformation initiatives, Iny said.

The survey found nearly 70% of respondents have at least five years of experience. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents reported that their income was not affected by the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, nearly half of respondents (54%) reported that they were concerned about job stability, an increase of more than 30% from a year ago.

The pandemic did change the way testers acquire new skills. The number of testers reporting that they attended online conferences, meetups and seminars increased to just under half (49.5%), up from 40.5% in 2019. Participation in online communities and forums grew to 44%, while only a third of respondents receiving any kind of formal training.

Testing professionals with five to 10 years of experience earned an average salary of $89,000 in North America, which compares to $76,000 in Australia/New Zealand, the survey also found.

Application testing as a distinct discipline doesn’t appear to be fading away anytime soon. Rather, organizations appear to be investing even more in testing to deliver higher-quality applications.

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Why This DevOps Wave Is Different

DevOps is not the first large-scale IT improvement initiative to gain industry momentum — but according to Troy DuMoulin of Pink Elephant, it may be the most durable. Writing on TechTarget, DuMoulin argues that previous IT transformation efforts were largely driven by internal innovation cycles. The current DevOps push, by contrast, is propelled by external economic and competitive forces: digital disruption has made speed-to-market a survival requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

Pink Elephant surveyed attendees at its annual ITSM conference to test whether these observations matched real organizational priorities. The results across several questions paint a consistent picture: IT teams are consciously trading process maturity for velocity, and they are reaching for frameworks — DevOps, Lean, and Agile — that promise exactly that.

DevOps-Focused Transformation: Where Organizations Stand

The survey’s first question asked respondents whether they were actively working on a DevOps-focused transformation. The intent was to measure how broadly the term DevOps culture had been adopted as a label for organizational improvement goals — specifically, the dismantling of silos and the improvement of cross-team communication and collaboration.

Finding: A majority of respondents — 57% — indicated that transforming to a DevOps culture was a current, active focus of their organization. While the question was binary and does not capture the depth or maturity of those efforts, the result suggests that DevOps has moved well beyond early-adopter status and into mainstream IT planning.

Speed Over Maturity: A Significant Shift in Priorities

Pink Elephant has run its annual conference for more than three decades. Historically, attendee discussions centered on ITSM process maturity, control frameworks, and high-availability practices. Over the three years prior to this survey, however, DuMoulin observed a marked shift in the language used by conference participants: terms associated with control and stability gave way to terms associated with urgency, velocity, and speed-to-market.

To test whether this language shift reflected genuine organizational priorities, the survey asked directly: Is process speed currently more important than process maturity?

Finding: Close to 60% of surveyed organizations confirmed that speed is currently more important to them than process maturity. This is a striking result from an audience historically focused on ITIL-aligned process rigor. It suggests that competitive pressure — not internal preference — is driving organizations to accept higher process risk in exchange for faster delivery cycles.

Frameworks Identified with Velocity: Year-Over-Year Adoption Trends

To understand which frameworks organizations are investing in, the survey asked respondents to select all methodologies currently representing an area of focus. The question was kept identical across two consecutive survey years to allow direct comparison. Respondents could choose multiple frameworks, and the results reflect current investment priorities rather than a ranking of overall importance.

The year-over-year comparison surfaces three notable trends:

• Waterfall project management declined sharply. Investment in traditional sequential, activity-based project management fell by 66% compared to the previous year’s survey. Waterfall remains a primary method in most organizations, but active development investment in the approach is dropping quickly.
• DevOps adoption grew 7% year over year. This was the highest positive change of any velocity-focused framework in the comparison period.
• Lean IT grew 6% year over year. Lean’s emphasis on eliminating waste and improving flow aligns directly with the speed-to-market priorities respondents identified elsewhere in the survey.

Agile also registered strong overall adoption — second only to ITSM across all frameworks listed. Given that ITSM adoption is expected given the conference context, Agile’s position reinforces the broader pattern: organizations are systematically reallocating attention toward frameworks that promise faster value delivery.

The Call to Action: Digital Disruption Leaves No Room for Delay

DuMoulin draws a historical parallel to make the scale of this shift concrete. The current IT transformation, he argues, is comparable in impact to the transition from centralized mainframe computing to decentralized client-server architectures. The critical difference is the driver: the client-server revolution was sparked by internal IT innovation, whereas the current transformation is being forced by external economic and competitive conditions.

Digital disruptors — competitors who have built software-first business models — can move faster, iterate more cheaply, and reach customers more directly than traditional enterprises. Organizations that do not increase their own speed to market risk losing market position to these competitors. In this context, the rapid growth of the DevOps trend is not a fad. It is a rational organizational response to an existential competitive threat.

The survey data supports this conclusion: organizations are not adopting DevOps because it is fashionable. They are adopting it — along with Lean and Agile — because they have concluded that their current delivery speeds are incompatible with the competitive environment they face.

Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners

• DevOps adoption is majority-level: More than half of surveyed IT organizations are actively pursuing a DevOps cultural transformation, not just evaluating it.
• Speed has displaced maturity as the top priority: Nearly 60% of organizations now rate delivery speed above process maturity — a significant change for an audience historically focused on ITIL rigor.
• Waterfall is losing investment, not just mindshare: A 66% year-over-year decline in active investment in waterfall project management represents a concrete reallocation of organizational attention.
• Lean and DevOps are growing together: The parallel growth of Lean IT and DevOps reflects a shared underlying goal: eliminating friction and accelerating the flow of value from idea to production.
• External pressure is the primary driver: Unlike previous IT transformation waves, the current DevOps push is being driven by competitive necessity rather than internal IT advocacy.

Original analysis by Troy DuMoulin, Pink Elephant. Source: TechTarget.

Public-Sector IT Confidence Is Slipping

Confidence in public-sector IT organisations may be on the decline, according to the 2017 Splunk Public Sector IT Operations Survey. The Ponemon Institute — in a Splunk-sponsored survey released in July 2017 — polled 1,227 IT decision-makers and managers, approximately 60 percent of whom work in U.S. federal agencies. The survey aimed to identify both the barriers holding agencies back and the investments most likely to move them forward.

The headline finding was stark: at least 60 percent of respondents said they felt as confident or less confident in carrying out their IT responsibilities than they did the previous year. The primary culprit identified in the report was organisational and technical siloing.

Silos: The Root Cause of Most IT Pain

IT staff ranked siloed operations as their number-one concern, citing a direct link between siloing and a lack of system integration and visibility. The inability to integrate systems was rated a severe threat by survey participants. A secondary but closely related problem was identified as a skills gap among existing staff — the second-highest-ranked concern overall.

Silos do not just create information blind spots; they also force teams into an over-reliance on manual processes. One of the starkest data points from the report underscores the operational cost of this fragmentation: according to Splunk Vice President for Public Sector Kevin Davis, the survey found that an average system outage carries a 44-hour downtime period and requires 12.5 staff members working to bring systems back online.

“One of the things the report brought back was that an average system outage has a 44-hour downtime and takes 12.5 staff members working” to bring systems back online.

Kevin Davis, Vice President for Public Sector, Splunk (via FCW)

Why DevOps Is Seen as the Solution

Despite the pessimism, the survey identified a clear source of optimism: investment in DevOps practices. Bill Emmett, then responsible for product marketing for IT operations at Splunk, explained the core value proposition plainly:

“Stronger DevOps basically means having a tighter integration between developers that are developing new systems and the operation teams that are deploying them and keeping them up and running. By having a tighter relationship, it ensures things like being able to reduce the amount of downtime incidences and the time required to recover.”

Bill Emmett, Splunk (via FCW)

Emmett argued that tighter developer–operations collaboration creates a practical feedback loop that directly compresses recovery times. When developers are embedded in — or at least tightly coupled to — operational workflows, they can introduce fixes in hours rather than weeks. For agencies managing critical infrastructure or citizen-facing systems, that kind of responsiveness is not merely a quality-of-life improvement; it is a mission-critical capability.

Spending Trends: DevOps and Cloud Up, On-Premises Down

The survey data on planned spending reinforces the shift in priorities:

• ~50% of respondents anticipated an increase in DevOps and cloud operations spending over the following year.
• Only 29% anticipated any increase in on-premises (on-site) infrastructure spending.

Emmett characterised the projected DevOps spending increase as significant for the federal IT community, predicting that greater DevOps adoption would yield two compounding benefits: fewer problems occurring in the first place, and faster, more agile responses when problems do arise.

“Half of respondents anticipate more resources being devoted to [DevOps] over the next year and that projected increase … is significant to the federal IT community. That you avoid problems in the first place, and that you’re very nimble at responding to them when they do arrive.”

Bill Emmett, Splunk (via FCW)

Key Takeaways for Public-Sector DevOps Teams

• Break down silos first. No tooling investment will compensate for teams that cannot share data, context, or accountability. Cross-functional visibility is a prerequisite for DevOps to work.
• Address the skills gap deliberately. Identifying which skills are missing — automation, observability, cloud operations — and investing in training or hiring is as important as the technology itself.
• Measure what matters. The 44-hour average outage statistic is a compelling baseline. Tracking mean time to recovery (MTTR) and outage frequency before and after DevOps investment provides concrete evidence of progress.
• Align developer and operations incentives. The core DevOps insight — that developers and operations staff need shared goals and shared tools — applies just as much in a government agency as it does in a commercial startup.
• Plan for cloud, but manage the transition. With on-premises spending projected to decline and cloud adoption rising, agencies need migration strategies that preserve continuity and compliance.

While this survey data is from 2017, the structural challenges it identified — siloing, manual processes, skills gaps, and the difficulty of integrating legacy systems — remain active concerns in public-sector IT environments today. The directional conclusion — that DevOps practices reduce downtime and improve organisational agility — has only grown more broadly supported in the years since.

Public sector IT is suffering from a major crisis in confidence when it comes to the pace of change, new figures have claimed.

Despite the need to implement digital transformation ideas and updates, many organisations are facing several major hurdles, according to the 2017 Public Sector IT Operations Survey from Splunk.

The study found that public sector organisations undergoing digital transformation are losing confidence in the ability of their IT teams to keep tabs on the increasing level of new technologies alongside growing external expectations.

Overall, 78 per cent of the organisations surveyed said that a lack of end-to-end visibility was the biggest hurdle to delivering services effectively, while 68 per cent and 64 per cent reported that skills and resources respectively were major issues.

The survey, which quizzed 1227 public sector IT professionals, also found that on average, it takes 41 hours and 11 staff members to restore IT systems to operational status following an outage, costing an average of £21,846.

Almost one third (31 per cent) believe better network visibility would be the most effective way to strengthen IT operations

“There’s no question that a lack of visibility is a major factor shaking the confidence of IT operations staff and management,” said Kevin Davis, vice president of public sector, Splunk.

“A majority of IT decision makers do not think or are unsure if challenges such as IT troubleshooting, service monitoring, security and business and mission analytics can be addressed using a single set of data. Splunk has helped many of our customers realise this and ultimately become more analytics driven. By giving our customers the ability to ingest data once and use it across their IT infrastructure, public sector organisations can get ahead of IT modernisation programs, ultimately helping them embrace digital transformation.”

However help may be at hand in the form of DevOps strategies, which are helping many businesses achieve success despite the rising complexity of IT challenges facing public sector bodies today. The study found that 54 per cent of organisations expect spending on DevOps to increase next year, while 53 per cent forecast increased investment in cloud operations over the same period

“The confidence gap we are seeing maps to other industry and government technology trends including growing public scrutiny, ever-present resource limitations and rapidly increasing expectations of technology by end-users. There’s never been a more important time for public sector organisations to embrace analytics to help them face and overcome these challenges with data,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

“It’s a challenging time to work in Government IT, but there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful for the future. It’s not surprising public sector IT leaders are looking to analytics, cloud and DevOps to help accelerate IT performance and management.”

The ‘findings’ this year suggest that, as we have hinted more than once recently, the crucial bridge to the new efficiencies in software application development shops come from automation.

Puppet says that the highest performing organisations have automated as much as 72 percent of all configuration management processes.

From Niche Concept to Business Imperative

DevOps reached mainstream status by solving a fundamental tension inside technology organisations: the conflict between the pace of development and the stability demands of operations. When those two functions work in silos, releases slow down, incidents multiply, and innovation stalls. When they work together under a shared DevOps culture, delivery accelerates and quality improves simultaneously.

Industry research such as the annual State of DevOps Report (published by DORA, now part of Google Cloud) has repeatedly documented a performance gap between high-performing DevOps organisations and low performers — across deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recover, and change failure rate. Organisations that consistently score in the elite tier on those four metrics tend to outpace competitors on both revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

Why DevOps Translates to Competitive Advantage

Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees, has summarised the strategic value well:

“A DevOps approach enables companies to respond much more quickly to customer needs, competitive pressures and realise faster time to innovation. Because DevOps is all about a culture of shared goals, and processes that accelerate software delivery through smaller, incremental releases, issued more frequently.”

Sacha Labourey, CEO, CloudBees

That framing highlights three concrete advantages:

• Speed to market. Smaller, more frequent releases mean new features and fixes reach users faster. A company shipping valuable updates weekly outpaces one shipping quarterly, all else being equal.
• Responsiveness to customers. Continuous feedback loops — enabled by monitoring, alerting, and frequent deployments — let teams course-correct before small problems become large ones.
• Faster innovation cycles. When deployment risk is low and rollback is straightforward, engineers experiment more freely. That experimentation is the engine of product innovation.

Cultural Change Is Non-Negotiable

Labourey also cautions that tooling alone will not deliver these benefits. DevOps only reaches its full potential when the entire organisation is aligned — from engineering teams to leadership to business stakeholders. Deploying a CI/CD pipeline without addressing the underlying cultural dynamics is a common and costly mistake.

Successful DevOps adoption requires:

• Internal education at all levels. Developers, operations engineers, security teams, product managers, and executives all need to understand the structural and cultural shift that DevOps represents. A VP who still measures success by headcount rather than deployment frequency will undermine progress.
• Breaking down organisational silos. Teams that have historically operated independently — or worse, in opposition — must be brought into shared workflows, shared metrics, and shared accountability.
• Aligned goals and shared definitions of success. Many inter-team conflicts arise because development is measured on feature velocity while operations is measured on uptime stability. DevOps replaces those competing incentives with unified objectives such as reliable, frequent delivery.

Turning Former Adversaries into Collaborators

The classic pre-DevOps tension between “Dev” (move fast, ship features) and “Ops” (maintain stability, avoid change) is well documented. In organisations where that tension has escalated into entrenched conflict, DevOps adoption is harder but even more valuable. The cultural shift requires active leadership sponsorship, clear communication of why things are changing, and patience — culture does not change overnight.

Practical steps that help bridge this divide include:

• Embedding operations engineers in development squads (or vice versa) so knowledge flows in both directions.
• Using blameless post-mortems to build psychological safety and make failure a learning event rather than a political one.
• Establishing shared on-call rotations so developers experience the operational consequences of their code.
• Measuring and celebrating team-level outcomes rather than individual heroics.

The Cost of Standing Still

Organisations that delay DevOps adoption do not simply stay in place — they fall behind. As competitors reduce their lead times and increase deployment frequency, the gap in responsiveness and innovation rate compounds over time. What was once a six-month release cycle becomes a genuine competitive liability when a rival can iterate weekly.

The good news is that it is never too late to start. Most organisations begin with a focused pilot — a single product team, a single pipeline — and expand the model as they demonstrate results. The key is to start with both the tooling and the culture in mind from day one, rather than treating one as an afterthought of the other.

Key Takeaways

• DevOps is a mainstream business strategy, not a niche engineering practice.
• Its primary competitive advantages are speed to market, customer responsiveness, and faster innovation cycles.
• Tooling without cultural alignment delivers limited and fragile results.
• Shared goals and unified success metrics are the foundation for turning adversarial teams into collaborative ones.
• Organisations that delay adoption widen the gap between themselves and competitors who have already made the shift.

Agile Adoption Is Near-Universal — But Depth Varies

Enterprise software development has broadly embraced agile methodology. According to the 2017 Testing Trends survey, 94% of respondents said that many or some of their software teams were committed to agile practices. Only 32% reported that all their teams had fully adopted agile, however, highlighting a gap between organizational intent and consistent implementation. Just 6% said agile was either unused or still in a pilot phase — a clear signal that agile has become the dominant development philosophy across the industry.

Continuous Integration: Popular in Theory, Inconsistent in Practice

Despite agile’s dominance, continuous integration (CI) — the practice of frequently merging code changes into a shared repository and validating them against production-like systems — remains unevenly implemented. The survey data paints a mixed picture of integration frequency:

• Daily integration: 35% of respondents could integrate updates daily.
• Weekly integration: 17% integrated on a weekly cadence.
• Less than weekly, but more frequent than legacy cycles: 20% integrated more often than the traditional six-month or annual release windows.
• Hourly integration: This category grew by 10%, indicating a meaningful shift toward higher-frequency deployments.

While the trend is clearly moving toward more frequent integration, a significant portion of teams are still far from the continuous delivery ideal that CI is designed to enable.

Bug Fix Velocity: Improving, But Room Remains

One practical measure of CI maturity is how quickly teams resolve bugs. The survey found incremental improvement between 2016 and 2017:

• Fixed immediately: 23% in both 2016 and 2017 — no change.
• Fixed within a few working days: Improved from 48% to 51%.
• Fixed in more than a few days: Dropped slightly from 5% to 4%.

The survey report noted: “This is clearly an area where more work can be done by testing and development teams, since the benefits of fixing bugs immediately are well established.” Deferred bug remediation is a known risk in CI pipelines — bugs that linger increase integration complexity and can compound downstream quality issues.

Test Writing Practices: A Waterfall Hangover

One of the foundational practices of CI is writing tests alongside code — or ideally, before code (test-driven development). The survey reveals that this practice has not yet become the norm:

• 19% write tests when code is checked into the build system — the CI-aligned approach.
• 54% defer testing to a dedicated quality assurance phase.
• 22% write tests only after development is complete — a pattern more consistent with waterfall development.
• 5% do not write automated tests at all.

This means roughly 81% of teams are not integrating tests at the point of code commit, which limits the feedback value of a CI pipeline. The ideal CI setup catches regressions at commit time, not in a downstream QA phase.

Test Automation: Broad Adoption, Uneven Execution

Test automation adoption is high at the surface level, with 87% of development teams using some form of automated testing. However, the tooling landscape and actual automation depth vary considerably:

• Open source tools (e.g., Selenium, Appium): Used by 70% of respondents.
• Proprietary tools: 12%.
• Manual testing only: 13%.
• Automated test framework in use: 52%.
• Mostly or entirely manual test setup and execution: 42%.

The coexistence of high automation adoption with 42% still relying predominantly on manual processes suggests that many teams are in a transition state — applying automation selectively rather than systematically throughout the pipeline.

Cloud-Based Testing Is Growing Steadily

The use of public cloud infrastructure for testing has shown consistent year-over-year growth:

• 2015: 43%
• 2016: 45%
• 2017: 52%

A 9-percentage-point increase over two years indicates that cloud-based test infrastructure is becoming a mainstream choice, offering on-demand scalability that supports the higher deployment frequencies that CI demands.

DevOps: High Awareness, Low Full Adoption

DevOps has clearly moved beyond buzzword status. The survey found that 88% of respondents had adopted DevOps practices, were in the process of adopting them, or were actively considering adoption. The survey used the following working definition:

“A practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other IT professionals while automating the processes of software delivery.”

Despite the high interest, full organizational adoption remains rare:

• Fully adopted across the company: Only 10%.
• A few teams using it: 24%.
• Just started: 25%.
• Still considering: 15%.
• No plans to adopt: 6%.

This pattern — broad organizational awareness but shallow implementation — mirrors the agile adoption curve. The data suggests that DevOps, like agile before it, is spreading team by team rather than transforming entire organizations at once.

Who Responded to the Survey?

The 732 respondents were drawn from web and application testing professionals. The breakdown by company size was roughly even across small (<100 employees, 32%), mid-size (100–1,000 employees, 33%), and enterprise (>1,000 employees, 35%) organizations. Eighty-seven percent were based in North America or Europe. By role:

• Developers: 23%
• Test engineers: 19%
• QA engineers: 17%
• QA team managers: 9%
• DevOps advocates or specialists: 8%
• Architects: 6%
• Development team managers: 6%

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Engineering Teams

The 2017 data tells a consistent story: the industry knows where it needs to go, but closing the gap between aspiration and practice takes time. For teams looking to move the needle on CI maturity, the survey highlights three practical focus areas:

1. Shift tests left. Writing tests at commit time rather than in a downstream QA phase is the single most direct way to realize the feedback benefits of a CI pipeline.
2. Reduce bug fix latency. Immediate bug remediation prevents accumulation of technical debt that slows future integration cycles.
3. Standardize automation tooling. High-level automation adoption masks significant inconsistency in how automation is applied. Teams benefit from aligning on a framework that integrates with their CI/CD pipeline end to end.

The “Testing Trends In 2017” survey was conducted by Dimension Data and sponsored by Sauce Labs, a cloud-based automated testing platform founded in 2008 in San Francisco. Original coverage appeared on InformationWeek.

Puppet and DORA Launch the 2017 State of DevOps Survey

Puppet, the infrastructure automation platform, announced in January 2017 the launch of its sixth annual State of DevOps Survey, produced in collaboration with DevOps Research & Assessment (DORA). Having surveyed more than 25,000 IT professionals over five previous editions, the State of DevOps Report is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of DevOps adoption and outcomes in the industry.

Each year the report examines how technical practices and workplace culture influence IT team performance and broader organizational outcomes. The 2017 edition builds on prior years while introducing several new research areas.

What the Previous Five Years Revealed

Data gathered in earlier editions of the survey consistently showed a dramatic performance gap between high-performing and low-performing IT organizations. According to the press release, high performers demonstrated:

• 200× more frequent deployments than low-performing peers
• 2,555× faster lead times from code commit to production
• One-third the change failure rate of low performers

Beyond raw delivery metrics, previous reports also examined the human side of DevOps, including the effects of burnout, organizational culture, and employee engagement on team and business performance.

New Research Areas in the 2017 Survey

The 2017 edition expands on established themes while introducing three new areas of investigation:

1. Infrastructure Architecture Patterns

Containers attracted significant attention in DevOps circles heading into 2017, but the survey recognizes that sound infrastructure strategy involves more than simply containerizing workloads. This research strand explores how different infrastructure architecture decisions influence DevOps outcomes, giving practitioners data-backed guidance beyond the hype.

2. Experimentation in Software Development

The fail-fast principle is a common DevOps talking point, but the 2017 survey sets out to measure its real-world impact. Researchers investigated the role of structured team experimentation in software development and delivery pipelines, looking for evidence of how a culture of experimentation correlates with delivery performance.

3. Business Outcomes Beyond Profit

Earlier editions demonstrated that IT performance drives commercial results—productivity, profitability, and market share. The 2017 survey broadened this lens to include organizations that are not profit-driven, such as government agencies and non-profits. By adding success metrics relevant to public-sector and mission-driven teams, the report aimed to make its findings actionable for the full range of organizations adopting DevOps.

What Industry Leaders Said

“I’m always struck by how much people rely on the DevOps Report for guidance, for understanding how DevOps can help, and for making the case for DevOps within their organizations. The data we gather this year will build on our understanding of DevOps, and we hope will reveal how people are practicing DevOps today, what new practices are emerging, and how the culture of DevOps is changing.”

— Nigel Kersten, Chief Technical Strategist, Puppet

“I am very excited about this year’s research, because we’ll be exploring aspects of leadership and architecture to show how it enables DevOps outcomes, as well as how it may achieve objectives that organizational leaders care about most. By doing this, we’ll understand better than ever what impacts DevOps performance—and how to better show its value to everyone in the organization.”

— Gene Kim, Co-founder, DORA; Co-author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook

Survey Sponsors

The 2017 State of DevOps Report was sponsored by Atlassian, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Splunk, Inc.

Why the State of DevOps Report Matters

For DevOps practitioners, the State of DevOps Report serves as an evidence base for internal advocacy. The quantitative performance gaps documented across six years of research give engineering leaders concrete data to justify investment in CI/CD pipelines, automation, blameless postmortems, and cultural change programs. The expansion into non-profit and government contexts in 2017 was a notable signal that DevOps principles were maturing beyond their Silicon Valley origins into broader enterprise and public-sector adoption.

The research methodology, developed in collaboration with DORA, uses validated survey instruments and statistical analysis to identify causal relationships rather than simple correlations—a key reason the report has maintained credibility with both practitioners and executives over its multi-year run.

About DORA and the Accelerate Research

DORA (DevOps Research & Assessment) was co-founded by Gene Kim, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, and Jez Humble. The organization’s research eventually formed the backbone of the book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps (2018), which formalized the four key metrics—deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore, and change failure rate—that are now widely used to measure software delivery performance. The 2017 survey was a direct predecessor to that work.