Software quality beats delivery speed for most developers

The latest State of Software Quality survey from continuous reliability company OverOps shows that 70 percent of respondents say quality is paramount and they would rather delay the product roadmap than risk a critical error impacting their users.

In addition, over half of survey respondents (53 percent) indicate they encounter critical or customer-impacting issues in production at least one or more times a month. A quarter of participants also say that over 40 percent of critical production issues are first reported by end users or customers rather than internal mechanisms.

The study shows DevOps investment continues with Continuous Integration (54 percent) and Continuous Delivery (42 percent), both hallmarks of accelerated software delivery pipelines, among the top three areas cited. 45 percent of all respondents say that pressure to move fast is one of their top software quality challenges. Further, over half of respondents (59 percent) say they release new code/features anywhere from bi-weekly to multiple times a day.

However, troubleshooting does hit productivity, two out of three survey participants report spending at least one day a week troubleshooting issues in their code, with 30 percent spending anywhere from two days to a full week.

"The move to DevOps and the increasing velocity at which teams are delivering software is unprecedented. At the same time, they are dealing with much higher levels of risk and vulnerability," says Herb Krasner, an advisory board member of the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ). "Although the issue of poor-quality software has existed since the dawn of IT, we have reached a turning point where we need to be much more serious about how we address these issues going forward. As such, the results and recommendations from the OverOps State of Software Quality report are important and timely."

The top plans for adoption in 2020 are static analysis (37 percent) and dynamic code analysis (27 percent), beaten only by DevOps (58 percent) and microservices/containers (45 percent).

The full report is available on the OverOps site.

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