Globally, 85% of those surveyed reported encountering increased pressure to accelerate release velocity, while 77% pointed to mounting pressure to deliver seamless and secure digital experiences.
While developers are expected to deliver new tools and functionality at ever faster speeds, they also find themselves on the receiving end of endless demands to help site reliability engineers (SREs) and IT operations teams manage the ongoing availability and performance of applications.
As a result, teams of developers spend hours in war-room meetings and on debugging applications, instead of creating code and building new applications.
Developers said the issue is down to their organisations not having the right tools and visibility required to understand the root cause of application issues. They believe this stems from IT departments lacking a full and unified view into applications and the supporting IT stack.
Developers are acutely concerned about the potential consequences this could have, with three quarters (75%) of those surveyed fearing that the lack of visibility and insight into IT performance is increasing the chances of their organisation suffering downtime and disruption to business-critical applications.
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The situation is significantly affecting morale amongst developers, with 82% admitting that they feel frustrated and demotivated, and 54% increasingly inclined to leave their current job.With demand for developer skills at an all-time high amid a finite pool of talent, businesses cannot afford an exodus of talent simply because their IT teams don’t have the tools they need to do their jobs.
Cisco conducted research amongst 500 global software developers split across the US (200), UK (100), Australia (30), and the rest of the world (170 – including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Japan, Singapore, and India).
“While most IT departments have deployed a multitude of monitoring tools across different domains, they simply fall short when it comes to today’s complex and dynamic IT environments, leaving technologists unable to generate a full and unified view into their applications and the supporting IT stack,” said Shannon McFarland, vice-president at Cisco DevNet.
“When things go wrong, it’s incredibly difficult to quickly identify where the root cause lies, often resulting in panic war room situations and developers having to spend hours trying to help their colleagues in IT operations identify the quickest path to remediation,” he added.
Encouragingly, developers are acutely aware that there are solutions available to address these concerns, and as many as 91% feel that they should be playing a bigger role in shaping and deciding on the solutions needed within their organisation.
Above all else, developers pointed to full-stack observability as being a potential game changer, providing SREs and IT operations teams with unified visibility into applications and supporting infrastructure across both cloud-native and on premises environments.
