Build 2015: Microsoft builds a case for DevOps as research reveals 40 per cent of software projects suffer costly downtime

$100,000 cost for every hour of downtime has encouraged team to make changes

Forty per cent of IT software projects fail at a cost of $100,000 per hour of downtime, Microsoft revealed this afternoon in a Build 2015 breakout session.

Speaking at the San Francisco developers' event today, Visual Studio Online product manager Ed Blankenship offered up some candid details based on stats from Microsoft customers, as well as his team's own experiences of software development.

"The problem is that much of what we build is based on assumptions, and not hard data," said Blankenship.

"And you could see how this easily leads a team to ending up building the wrong thing."

Blankenship said that this "in the long run can end up threatening your business".

"In the real world there are real consequences if you're unable to deliver software quickly and efficiently. For example, 40 per cent of implementations we end up seeing end up failing, and have to be reworked because they don't end up meeting the original requirements," said Blankenship.

"It's also really expensive when there's downtime - our latest estimates are $100,000 for a customer-facing app for every hour it's down in production, and when you pair that with how long it takes to fix those problems - 200 minutes - it becomes really expensive," he added.

Blankenship said that in an effort to minimise delays, around three-quarters of software development teams that he has dealing with are adopting agile methods, "which is really good for 2015".

"But it doesn't help if the development team is agile, but deployment still takes weeks and months because the IT ops team is perceived as not being agile," he added.

Revealing a selection of product updates for Visual Studio designed to support DevOps, including the ability to rename projects in a collaboration space, Blankenship admitted the Visual Studio team had learned to appreciate the benefits of DevOps at first hand.

"[For example], when we were given feedback, I used to have to tell people ‘We'll do that in three years [the average time between versions of Visual Studio in the past]'. So we've moved to a three-week release schedule now. We're able to get feedback a lot more quickly," he said.

Visual Studio Online Extensions was also announced, which Blankenship said would allow "customers and partners to bake abilities straight into our UI".

Meanwhile, CodeLens, a heads-up display to allow a coder to find information about code in-context, has been added to Visual Studio Professional and above, after only being available in the Ultimate version previously. Visual Studio Online has also now received CodeLens in order to assist with DevOps practice.

"At Microsoft, the development investments we're making reflect on our focus on enabling and empowering teams to get great software in the hands of your customers," concluded Blankenship.

To learn more about DevOps and take part in peer-led discussions, why not sign up for Computing's DevOps Summit 2015? The free event takes place on 8 July 2015 in London.