Only 1 in 10 developers deploy software on demand, multiple times per day, according to the Cloud Delivery Foundation’s 2021 State of Continuous Delivery report.

Continuous delivery is a key part of how organizations deliver value to their customers, providing the ability to make small changes to software reliably and at any time, according to the report. 

The study, completed by research firm SlashData from data collected from more than 19,000 developers, asked for information on lead time for changes, deployment frequency, time to restore services, and change fail rates. 

Two-thirds of respondents indicated it takes at least a week for code to go from committed to successfully run in production. Only about 6 percent said they can move code from commit to production in under an hour.

The programming languages that rank highest for speed and stability in software delivery performance are the shell scripting languages (Bash and PowerShell), with Go/Golang and JavaScript being the next best choices. Interestingly, Ruby, Python and Java — three of the most popular languages based on Tiobe rankings, were poorest in terms of software delivery performance.

“Having access to new relevant data is critical to assessing and making the right decisions. By building this State of CD Report, we have produced an exclusive dashboard for use by our community that shows the current state of continuous delivery for deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service, and more,” said Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation executive director. “Moving forward, we will publish this report annually in order to track the world’s capacity to deliver software with speed and security.”