From Frustration to Innovation

by Cisco DevNet
https://developer.cisco.com/articles/from-frustration-to-innovation/from-frustration-to-innovation

The study discusses the following problem: developers are too busy by firefighting so that they don’t have enough time for innovation.

Summary numbers:

  • 95% of developers report that they are facing increased pressure to accelerate release velocity
  • 77% point to mounting pressure to deliver seamless digital experiences
  • 90% of developers claim that full-stack observability is now essential if organizations want to deliver seamless digital experiences
  • 67% of developers state that their organization hasn’t got the right tools and visibility to understand the root causes of application issues and to effectively resolve them
  • 75% fear that the lack of visibility into IT performance is increasing the chances of their organization suffering from downtime and disruption to business critical applications
  • 74% of developers feel unable to fulfill their potential and progress their careers as they would like as a result of spending too much time in war rooms
  • 72% feel like they are simply wasting their time.

Research methodology Cisco conducted research amongst global software developers. The research consisted of online interviews with 500 software developers, split across the U.S. (200), UK (100), Australia (30), and the rest of the world (170 - including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Japan, Singapore, India). The research was conducted in March and April 2024.

Excerpts

Developers are being expected to deliver new tools and functionality at ever faster speeds; but, at the same time, they’re also facing endless demands to help operations teams manage the ongoing performance of applications - something which should not really be within their remit.
The upshot is that many developers are stuck in reactive mode, debugging applications instead of creating code and building new applications. They’re caught in a never-ending cycle of firefighting.

Unfortunately, this situation is having profound consequences at both an organizational and individual level. Organizations are becoming more vulnerable to application performance issues and less able to innovate at speed. Developers, meanwhile, are growing frustrated that they’re unable to prioritize the job they were hired to do.