GitLab survey: How companies develop and deploy automatically and with AI
GitLab's new DevSecOps report reveals German companies are cutting deployment times in half and increasingly leveraging AI to boost productivity.
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GitLab has published its eighth Global DevSecOps Report on the current state of software development, deployment and the software lifecycle. Over 5,000 top managers, IT managers, developers and admins took part in the large but non-representative study in April, over 600 of them from Germany. The results show that productivity in the software lifecycle has accelerated dramatically: According to 69 percent of respondents, their companies worldwide are delivering software twice as fast as in the previous year; in Germany, as many as 77 percent of participants said the same.
For comparison, the figures for other countries:
- 71 percent Japan
- 66 percent France
- 65 percent Australia
- 65 percent United Kingdom
- 64 percent United States
According to the study, automation is a driving factor in the software lifecycle: 74% of respondents in Germany stated that they already automate the lifecycle – the highest figure worldwide - and 53% now use AI for this purpose. Globally, only 26% of participants confirmed the use of AI. Only 42% use a DevSecOps platform such as the offerings from GitHub or GitLab.
The productivity-oriented output not only affects software management, but also its development itself. 77% of the developers surveyed provide new code several times a week, 30% even daily. 57 percent of top managers (C-level) see measuring developer productivity as a key to the company's growth, but 56 percent are dissatisfied with the current measurement methods.
53 percent of participants believe that at least a quarter of their code base comes from open source projects, but only 22 percent keep a software bill of materials that breaks down the composition of the code. 43% complain that high administrative effort in the organization slows down the elimination of vulnerabilities.
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This year's conference on the container ecosystem will focus on AI-supported DevOps, security and FinOps as well as sustainability. Every year, the CLC conference - Continuous Lifecycle/ContainerConf - addresses the most important issues relating to Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Dev(Sec)Ops and GitOps in order to provide answers, know-how and support for everyday project work.
Interested parties can now secure tickets at the early bird price with a 200 euro discount. The offer is valid until September 23.
Dispute over AI in the company
While security was a strong focus in last year's report, this year it is AI. In addition to the aforementioned use of AI in the lifecycle, GitLab asked about concerns about AI: 56 percent of participants worldwide have such concerns, while 40 percent see data protection and security as the main obstacle to its use. 35 percent of top managers cited the lack of suitable AI skills in the team as a problem. However, only 26 percent of developers and admins agreed with this and complained about not receiving adequate training and resources. In turn, only 15 percent of top managers could confirm this. These contradictory figures reveal that there is a clear gap in the self-perception of artificial intelligence in many companies.
Of AI users, 74 percent want to reduce their tool chain, but only 57 percent of non-users. A total of 17 percent have already started such a consolidation.
GitLab conducted the survey with the consulting firm Omdia in April 2024 among 5,315 software experts worldwide, including 634 from Germany. In addition to a distribution list from GitLab, a panel sampling from Omdia was used for the sample to reduce distortions.
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