About the Continuous Delivery 

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software development practice that enables developers to release small but frequent software updates reliably and safely. Closely linked to the broader DevOps cultural movement, CD consists of a set of practices that aim to automate and streamline the software delivery process. These practices, in turn, allow developer teams to innovate faster by collecting regular user feedback and prioritising the product features and fixes that matter. 

About the report 

In this report, commissioned by the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) and authored by SlashData, we explore the current state of the CD developer ecosystem and how this has evolved over the past two and half years. We will look at what proportion of developers are involved in the broader DevOps space and how many work with CD technologies in particular.

Moreover, we will see how developers’ software delivery performance has changed over time. Finally, we will explore how developers’ usage of multiple continuous integrations and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools contribute to software delivery performance, as well as how approaches to application security testing change delivery performance.

The findings in this report are based on data from SlashData’s past six Developer Nation surveys, which reached more than 125,000 respondents worldwide over two and half years, from Q3 2020 to Q1 2023. 

Methodology 

The 24th edition of the Developer Nation survey reached nearly 26,000 respondents from 166 countries around the world. As such, the Developer Nation series of surveys continues to be the most global independent research on mobile, desktop, industrial IoT, consumer electronics, embedded, third-party app ecosystems, cloud, web, game, augmented and virtual reality, and machine learning developers and data scientists combined, ever conducted. The report is based on a large-scale, online developer survey designed, produced, and carried out by SlashData over a period of ten weeks between December 2022 and February 2023.

Respondents to the online survey came from 166 countries, including major app and machine learning development hotspots such as the US, China, India, Israel, the UK, and Russia, even stretching all the way to Kenya, Brazil, and Jordan. The geographic reach of this survey is truly reflective of the global scale of the developer economy. The online survey was translated into eight languages in addition to English, namely simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese, and Korean, and was promoted by more than 100 leading community and media partners within the software development industry.

To eliminate the effect of regional sampling biases, we first weighted to correct for over-represented individual countries within regions. We then weighted the regional distribution across nine regions by a factor that was determined by the regional distribution and growth trends identified in our Developer Nation research. Each of the separate branches: mobile, desktop, Industrial IoT, consumer electronics, embedded software, third-party app ecosystems, cloud, web, games, augmented and virtual reality, and data science and machine learning were weighted independently and then combined.

To minimise other important sampling biases across our outreach channels, we weighted the responses to derive a representative distribution for technologies used and developer segments. Using ensemble modelling methods, we derived a weighted distribution based on data from independent, representative channels, excluding the channels of our research partners, to eliminate sampling bias due to respondents who were recruited via these channels. Again, this was performed separately for each of mobile, industrial IoT, consumer electronics, embedded software, third-party app ecosystems, desktop, cloud, web, games, augmented and virtual reality, and data science and machine learning.