While artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly considered the ultimate productivity tool for devs, the real impact of these tools on the IT department is still in its infancy.
That’s according to a recent DevOps Trends report, published by Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team and based on data from 36,000 IT professionals around the world.
While many experts say that AI will boost software development and deployment and software deployment productivity, as well as developer job satisfaction, “so far, the results of our investigation do not go in this direction”, contradict the authors of the report.
“AI has a neutral or even negative effect on the performance of the development team”
“Our data suggests that AI slightly improves measures of individual well-being, such as burnout and job satisfaction. But that it has a neutral or even negative effect on development team performance and software delivery performance.
These mixed results are likely because we are only in the early stages of AI adoption, they say: “There is a lot of excitement about the potential of AI development tools. But it will be some time before AI-powered tools are used in a widespread and coordinated way.”
Despite the limited impact of AI so far, the survey now identifies factors for progress for developer teams looking for productivity gains.
5 DevOps best practices to use now in the IT department
On this point, the researchers identify in their study a segment of professionals – called “elite” – who are at the top of their art. These professionals only need a day of lead time to make application changes, compared to a week to a month for less efficient teams. They may also deploy software multiple times per day. They also report a failure rate of 5% or less for faulty software. In contrast, low-performing software teams have rates above 60%.
If AI can help IT pros in the future, this group of “elite” developers are adopting best practices now that make a difference. The authors of the study identify these practices:
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Build with users in mind: Google research shows “that a user-centered approach to building applications and services is one of the strongest predictors of overall organizational performance. Teams that focus on the user have 40% higher organizational performance than teams that don’t.” -
Establish a healthy culture: “Teams made up of people who feel integrated and belong to a team have 30% higher organizational performance than organizations that don’t have a healthy company culture.” -
Strive for high-quality documentation: High-quality documentation amplifies the impact of DevOps technical capabilities – for example, continuous integration – on organizational performance. High-quality documentation can improve dev team performance by 25%. compared to low quality documentation.” -
Distribute work fairly: “We find that respondents who take on more repetitive tasks are more likely to experience higher levels of burnout, and that women and members of minority groups are more likely to take on more repetitive tasks.” -
Exploit the flexibility of Cloud computing: “Using a public cloud results in a 22% increase in infrastructure flexibility compared to not using the cloud. This flexibility, in turn, enables teams to have 30% organizational performance. higher than those whose infrastructures are not flexible.”
Contrary to popular and deeply held belief, software developers do not work in isolation. On the contrary, they work as a team and strive to concentrate on their activity. The survey helps shed light on what’s important to top developers – and right now, it’s not AI.
Source: “ZDNet.com”