ActiveState’s 2020 State of Enterprise CI/CD Survey

Update 2021: We’ve compiled the results of the survey in a downloadable datasheet so that you can gain a better understanding of where your CI/CD implementation stands compared to other survey respondents. After reading the survey results, learn how to optimize your CI/CD implementation with our resources.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CI/CD) is an agile software development best practice designed to enable more frequent and reliable code changes. And if you’re building a commercial application, who wouldn’t want that? As a result, there are a large number of CI/CD vendors with various offerings vying for a place in the software development processes of organizations.

With so many vendors and solutions, no universal out-of-the-box approach exists. In fact, most enterprise implementations are a mix of proprietary tools, open source, and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software that provides for one or more of the following CI/CD processes:

• Automated build 
• Automated unit tests 
• Automated acceptance tests
• Automated performance tests
• Automated security tests 
• Automated provisioning and deployment to testing environments
• Automated deployment to production

Additionally, most organizations have a long way to go before they’ve fully automated all CI/CD processes as many surveys (such as this one from devops.com) show. 

ActiveState CI/CD Research

Here at ActiveState, we’re researching how our multi-language, multi-platform open source language automation platform (the ActiveState Platform) can help improve enterprise CI/CD tooling and practices. With a 20 year history of open source language support for organizations both large and small, we’ve seen some common pitfalls that may be negatively impacting CI/CD implementations, including:

• Reproducibility – with more frequent code check-ins and deployments, any inconsistencies between dev, test, and production environments can introduce major stumbling blocks.
• Transparency – security and compliance issues that arise from a lack of provenance around open source language artifacts can also hold up the CI/CD chain.

Preliminary polling (100 respondents) seem to back up these assertions, namely:

• 30% of those polled said one of their major challenges is bugs and errors that cropped up due to differences between development, testing/staging, and production language runtimes.
• 40% of those polled indicated that automating security management for languages and dependencies remains a major challenge.

CI/CD Survey Results

While our State of Enterprise CI/CD Survey is over, we’re sure that you have many questions such as: how does my enterprise’s practice of CI/CD compare to other enterprise’s CI/CD practice? And, more importantly, how can I improve my practices?

You can find the results of the survey here and read about our CI/CD implementation insights here.

Explore other CI/CD resources from ActiveState.