However, significant work remains to be done. A targeted study highlights several key factors that dictate the success of this methodology. According to the research, "for every team doing DevOps correctly, many other organizations remain stuck in their DevOps evolutionary journey for far too long."
From this perspective, the primary cause of this stagnation is that companies fail to address or fully comprehend the cultural, organizational, and process changes required to adopt a new way of working with technology. For example, an organization may invest heavily in automation while leaving organizational silos and misaligned deployment incentives unaddressed—factors that underpin DevOps practices regardless of the chosen Software Architecture.
The authors of the report state that out of all organizations surveyed over the past four years, "approximately 80% sit at a mid-level of evolution." Consequently, their research focused on identifying the factors that either hinder or accelerate the evolution of companies within this group.
Process Automation
Among the most illustrative findings, 90% of respondents with highly evolved DevOps practices reported that their teams automated most repetitive tasks. However, 62% of companies "stuck in mid-level evolution" also reported high levels of automation. From this, the authors draw a primary conclusion: DevOps is not just about automation. "Being good at automation does not necessarily make a company good at DevOps," they argue.
Furthermore, while two out of three respondents reported using the public cloud, only one in four utilized it to its full potential. This indicates that "while cloud and automation are important, organizations must also address team and organizational aspects—helping teams clarify their mission, core customers, interfaces, and the factors that foster healthy interactions with others."
Thus, the report emphasizes that clear team identities and interaction paradigms matter. It notes that many companies fail to reach top-tier evolution due to organizational structures and dynamics, citing the following data:
- 91% of highly evolved teams reported a clear understanding of their responsibilities to other teams, compared to only 46% of low-evolution teams.
- 89% of highly evolved teams reported that members had clear roles, plans, and goals for their work, compared to only 46% of low-evolution teams.
Highly evolved organizations manage team cognitive load at scale by leveraging a combination of stream-aligned teams (teams aligned to a continuous flow of business value with end-to-end responsibility for designing, building, deploying, supporting, and retiring a product or service, along with associated feedback loops) and platform teams (whose role is to reduce cognitive load for stream-aligned teams by offering self-service IaaS or PaaS capabilities). They utilize a small number of well-defined team types whose roles and responsibilities are clearly understood by adjacent teams.
DevOps Culture
According to the authors, "cultural blockers keep mid-evolution companies stuck in the middle." While cultural challenges are most severe among low-evolution organizations, mid-evolution companies also exhibit persistent blockers, such as a risk-averse culture, unclear responsibilities, lack of focus on optimizing fast flow, and insufficient feedback loops.
Additionally, the study revealed that platform teams are critical for scaling success and extending the benefits of DevOps initiatives. Data from the mid-evolution cohort shows that 65% of companies at the higher end of the mid-tier (mid-high) utilize self-service platforms, compared to only 40% at the lower end (mid-low).
As organizations face growing pressure to accelerate software delivery, improve data migration agility, and build data-driven capabilities, this research offers valuable insights.
Crucially, it highlights that scaling DevOps practices across an enterprise requires addressing evolutionary blockers, refining organizational structures, and leveraging the strategic value of platform teams.
To read the full research report, you can visit this link.
Has your organization identified other key factors for successfully scaling DevOps practices?