Larger DevOps teams perform better, report

On balance, between five and 20 code contributors is the optimum size, says CircleCI

Larger DevOps teams typically outperform smaller ones in terms of workflow throughput and the time required to fix problems in the pipeline, according to the latest annual State of Software Delivery Report by CI/CD platform vendor CircleCI.

In its report, which is based on monitoring a quarter of a billion workflows occurring on its platform, CircleCI notes a correlation between larger team size and better engineering performance, with metrics such as throughput of workflows, the duration of individual workflows and mean time to recovery (MTTR) - the average time between a workflow's failure.

Operating with larger teams can also mean that individuals are less likely to suffer from burnout.

These are not the only metrics that matter, for example, managing a large team is more difficult. On balance, the company estimates that a team with between five and 20 code contributors is the optimum size.

In order that DevOps staff are operating ‘in the flow', as much as possible, companies should pay attention to schedules to avoid meetings clashing with times of peak productivity - which can be difficult with multinational teams.

The report offers benchmarks for high performing DevOps teams to aim at. Median workflow duration should be 10 minutes, it says, which allows for ample testing routines to be built into the pipeline. The average team is a long way off this figure, however, with an average workflow duration of 3.7 minutes.

An optimal MTTR is less than 60 minutes, the firms suggests, compared with a current average figures of 73.6 minutes; and organisations should aim for a workflow success rate (the number of successful runs divided by the total number of runs over a period of time) of 90 per cent for the default branch of their application, whereas the current average figure is 77 per cent.

CircleCI suggests that introducing more test driven development can help smaller teams automate their way to improved metrics.

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