Even with Agile and DevOps becoming more popular within the software development community, the application engineering process remains clunky. This is the lead finding of a recent survey of IT managers responsible for the SDLC. Frankly, is that conclusion all that surprising with network administrators now complaining about software teams dominating DevOps?
Let’s dive into the details of the survey to see what meaningful information lies within. Maybe your software team gains a new sense of direction on how to make the entire development process more efficient? Good luck!
The integration software company, MuleSoft recently surveyed 650 IT managers on a variety of topics related to application development. ZDNet summarized the survey’s findings in an article published earlier this week. This information definitely provides some food for thought for anyone working in the software engineering industry.
Somewhat surprisingly, 93 percent of those surveyed feel their organization’s software development efforts “could be more efficient.” They feel the process suffers from being clunky, which makes successful integration more difficult. This problem becomes exacerbated in the increasingly complex environment of the modern business landscape.
Another data point leading to this perception of inefficiency is the 83 percent who feel their company fails to reuse existing software when building new systems. Only a third of those surveyed mentioned their organization makes software assets available for reuse in new projects. This is a traditional problem in the development process; hampering attempts to improve efficiency for decades.
These inefficient software development processes are coming at a time when the C-Suite is demanding more from their application engineers. The MuleSoft survey reports an overall increase of 27 percent in the number of development projects last year. 12 percent of those surveyed managers saw their project load increase by over half.
Of course, the fact that two-thirds of the survey respondents were unable to deliver on all of their projects in the last year truly hits home. Aren’t Agile and/or DevOps making a difference in software development? The fact that these IT managers report responsibility for over one-thousand applications on average raises one obvious question. Are they simply overworked?
Poor integration between these applications – only 29 percent are successfully integrated – appears to be another factor leading to inefficiency. This survey finding perhaps isn’t too surprising considering MuleSoft’s focus on application integration. 81 percent of the survey respondents note that point-to-point integration is a major source of problems for their development teams.
In short, too much valuable development time is spent on one-off application integration efforts; siphoning resources better spent on other projects. Notably, nearly two-thirds of the surveyed managers are focused on this kind of work, as opposed to building new and innovative solutions. On the positive side of the ledger, more than half of the managers report that the use of APIs improves overall productivity, while also leading to increases in innovation, employee engagement, and faster deployment.
As organizations modernize their systems, and the use of DevOps and Agile continues to mature, hopefully the software development process finally wins that decades-long battle to improve efficiency.
Thank for reading this edition of the Betica Blog. Stay tuned for additional dispatches from the world of software development.
Posted on March 2, 2018 Categories Software Development Tags Agile, DevOps, Software Development