What does a high performing technology delivery team look like? How do you know if your team is doing well? While there have been many widely reported and shared surveys on technology delivery team behavior that define the metrics for high performers (Puppet State of DevOps Report 2019, 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps), at CircleCI we are privileged to have the vantage point of being able to review truly massive amounts of data on how technology delivery teams are behaving in the wild. Our cloud continuous integration and continuous delivery platform processes over 1.6 million job runs per day for more than 40,000 organizations and over 150,000 projects. We analyzed the data from 30 million workflows* to see how observed behavior compares to reported industry standards.

Our results show that continuous integration (CI) provides a clear path to becoming a high performing team:

  • Teams using CI are incredibly fast: 80% of all workflows finish in less than 10 minutes.
  • Teams using CI stay in flow and keep work moving: 50% of all recovery happens in under an hour.
    • 25% recover in 10 minutes.
    • 50% of orgs recover in 1 try.
  • Highly efficient CI tooling is in service to the needs of your business, not the other way around. Pipelines are flexible and changes to them are successful: 50% of projects never had a failure when pipeline changes were performed during the 90 days of observation.
  • If you are looking for a path to engineering success, focusing on CI will deliver results.

Teams using CircleCI are delivering at high velocity, with high confidence. This is the definition of being a high performance dev team. CI is confidence, automated.

While the question of whether CircleCI enables teams to be high performing or high performing teams choose CircleCI is yet to be determined, we can clearly see that teams who commit to the practice of CI can produce the best software, consistently, confidently, and at high velocity.

We know that implementing a robust, widely adopted CI practice is not easy. Delivering a great software product is not easy. But our data has great news: the average team using CI can achieve results that put them in the highest ranks of technology delivery teams. Your team does not have to have the world’s best DevOps practitioners to be one of the best dev teams. You don’t have to deploy a thousand times a day or spend a million dollars a month on infrastructure. Simply starting and committing to the practice of CI/CD is a reliable path to engineering success.

Read the full report here.