In October 2024, our IDC colleague Jennifer Thomson published an excellent presentation, Value-Driven DevOps and App Engineering in the AI Everywhere Era.
Delivered at IDC’s 2024 DevOps Summit in London, the presentation delves into the future of modern app development and delivery. This future is driven by three key factors: developer experience and productivity, security resilience, and business empowerment.
The future of DevOps is app-centric, focused on user experience, value, and resilience by design. Platform teams play a crucial role in enabling effective app development and management.
The transformation integrates security, finance, and operations into the development process to create a seamless and automated software delivery environment. However, achieving “value-driven DevOps and app engineering” requires breaking down the silos between DevOps, CloudOps, and DataOps and creating smart integrations to meet business needs for speed, security, and cost efficiency.
According to IDC research, delivery excellence is defined by four strategic priorities:
Agility is the core business outcome BUT business agility is most negatively affected by current capabilities in the development processes of organizations.
As an answer to the question: ‘Which of the following areas are most negatively affected by your organization’s current software development and delivery capabilities?’, the following answers were given:
Apparently, many organizations are restricted in their ability to deliver excellence by their own development processes. However, with the rise of AI, things may change fast! A few recent IDC predictions (IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Developer and DevOps 2024 Predictions — European Implications, IDC Doc #EUR151753024) show:
• By 2028, natural language will be the most widely used programming language, creating 55% of net-new applications.
• By 2028, generative AI (GenAI) tools will write 70% of software tests, reducing manual testing and enhancing test coverage, usability, and code quality.
• By 2025, 50% of DevOps teams will use DevSecOps tools leveraging AI to identify security challenges in applications and supply chains.
• By 2026, 40% of new apps will be enhanced by AI, improving experiences and creating new use cases.
Incorporation of AI into the development processes of organizations promises to improve all 4 aspects of delivery excellence: increased speed of delivery, efficiency, quality and productivity, resulting in better business agility, meaning that the organization can respond to market changes faster and is able to provide more value, faster and better to its customers.
This sounds great! However, as management guru Peter Drucker one said:” You can’t control what you don’t measure”. And if you can’t control something, it’s very hard to improve it. This means that measurement of Delivery Speed, Product Quality, Efficiency, Productivity and ultimately Value
delivered, is an important management activity for organizations that are determined to control and to improve their delivery excellence and thus business agility.
As an example, using AI to code faster may result in better productivity, but when this code is not compliant to ISO 25010 or ISO 5055 standards for software quality, significant risk may be introduced into the application, potentially resulting in incidents, unhappy customers, loss of money, rework in the team, resulting ultimately in lower productivity and delivery speed, etc. In this case, measuring productivity and code quality are important to understand the overall performance of the teams, in relation to the quality produced.
IDC Metri, the tech buyer consultancy part of IDC, has years of experience in measuring these aspects on the team level. It offers the ‘Team Performance Optimization’ service to organizations that wish to understand and benchmark their current delivery excellence on team-level, and aggregate this to an organizational level. By benchmarking, it becomes clear which of the teams are high-performing (against industry averages) and which teams can use some help to improve. For many organizations, it would be helpful to create a baseline performance now, so they can see which AI initiatives result in improvement of the metrics, and which don’t.
For more information about measuring, benchmarking and/or optimizing (agile/DevOps) team performance, please contact me at hvanheeringen@idc.com.