LeanIX State of Developer Experience Survey Reveals DevOps Practice Falls Short of Its Promise

BONN, Germany and BOSTON, June 28, 2022 – LeanIX, a leading platform enabling continuous transformation of corporate and product IT, today announced the findings of its State of Developer Experience Survey. The report reveals a significant gap between DevOps vision and reality. The lag in DevOps adoption, apart from negatively impacting the developer experience, poses a threat to the business.

The efficient delivery of valuable software remains a differentiating, competitive advantage. Without a full commitment to DevOps principles and relevant metrics, not only will developer teams struggle to demonstrate the value they deliver, they will also struggle to improve their performance. The good news is, the path to DevOps maturity is clear and achieving this maturity is one critical way for businesses to separate themselves from the competition.

The survey looked at where development teams find themselves today; how they describe the methods they employ; the challenges they face; the state of their interactions with the business; and where they should focus attention to put DevOps on a firm foundation and improve the developer experience within an organization.

Key findings from the report include:

• Fewer than 20% of respondents said that their development team was able to choose its own tech stack; 44% said they are partly able to and 38% they are not able to at all. Flexibility around choice of tools is a central component of DevOps culture because it enables organizations to react more quickly to changing customer and business needs.
• Only 20% of respondents indicate that they use a Value Stream Management (VSM) platform to track engineering efficiency and tie development activities to actual business results.
• When it comes to DevOps maturity, nearly 60% said that they are flexible in adapting to changing customer needs and have CI/CD pipelines set up. At the same time, less than half of engineers build/ship/own their code or work on teams based on team topologies, indicating a lack of DevOps maturity.
• Over 70% of respondents track open support tickets as a measure of customer value. While this metric is easily accessible, it provides limited insight into developer impact. Measures like feature adoption, churn, ROI, or NPS are better, however, fewer than half of those surveyed actually use those metrics.

“The survey makes plain that most developers face challenges in their daily work. DevOps methodologies were created to address these challenges but, as we see, the majority of companies have not yet fully implemented them,” said André Christ, CEO and co-Founder of LeanIX.

“The problem is that companies need to get better at building and shipping software. Businesses today depend on it. Companies that pursue DevOps maturity and adopt metrics clearly connected to business outcomes, such as DORA, will have a distinct advantage. All the other companies waste time and money just trying to catch up.”

Survey Methodology

In February and March 2022, 172 professionals from software development teams at international organizations participated in an online survey conducted by LeanIX and focused on working methods, working conditions, and challenges they face. For readability, the results in this report are presented as rounded percentages.

About LeanIX

LeanIX's Continuous Transformation Platform® is trusted by Corporate IT and Product IT to achieve comprehensive visibility and superior governance. Global customers organize, plan and manage IT landscapes with LeanIX's automated and data-driven approach. Offering Enterprise Architecture, SaaS Management, and Value Stream Management, LeanIX helps organizations make sound decisions and accelerate transformation journeys. LeanIX has hundreds of customers globally, including Adidas, Atlassian, Bosch, Dropbox, Santander and Workday. The company is headquartered in Bonn, Germany, with offices in Boston and around the world.