Tech Capability Trends Report

Introduction

In our inaugural Tech Capability Trend Report, we delve into the dynamic realm of EngineeringOps, exploring the evolving landscape of software development and operations. Since technology continues to play an evolving role in today’s landscape, our report shares insights into what leading companies are adopting and maturing across their businesses. This excerpt serves as a compass for CIOs and technology leaders navigating the complex terrain of tech acceleration and resiliency in 2023/2024.

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Capability Mapping: Navigating the Tech Landscape

To guide our exploration, we employ three main Accenture frameworks to map and communicate our findings. First, the Capability Maturity Model describes a 5-stage path of developing and refining capabilities, from growth to diminishment, to better understand which capabilities companies are exploring, adopting, or moving away from. Second, Capability Area identifies the four pillars of application and service delivery that work in conjunction to allow for seamless production. Lastly, Capability Impact focuses on the benefits of adopting these capabilities pertaining to efficiency and quality.

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Tech Radar for DevOps: Navigating the Landscape of Development and Operations

Central Metrics Store: Driving Insightful DevOps Practices

The Central Metrics Store, or Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms (SEIPs), serves as a centralized hub offering data-driven insights into engineering teams. Despite its benefits, potential risks include data quality issues and privacy concerns, emphasizing the need for careful consideration in implementation.

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SBOM, PaC, IaC and VSM: Tools Shaping the DevOps Landscape

Tools like SBOM (Software Bill of Materials), Policy-as-Code (PaC), Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), and Value Stream Management (VSM) play pivotal roles in modern DevOps. While SBOM offers unprecedented transparency, PaC embeds governance into code, IaC enhances the provisioning of resources, and VSM ensures end-to-end visibility and optimization of software delivery.

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Tech Radar for SRE: Navigating Site Reliability Engineering

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Balancing Speed and Stability

The shift from Waterfall to Agile, Project to Product, and improved Project Management led to the rise of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), emphasizing the blend of software development and operations. Observability, including complex capabilities like SLOs, Error Budgets, and Chaos Testing, has become a priority for mature teams. Yet, implementing SRE in enterprises comes with challenges such as the human factor, turnover, and resource constraints.

Our investigation into IT Service Management reveals a diminishing significance, with SRE stepping in to fill the gap. Areas like Demand Planning and Financial Management for IT Services pose challenges, but also exhibit signs of resurgence and innovation, now operating under the name “FinOps”. Generative AI, more commonly known as “GenAI,” is predicted to play a crucial role in driving these changes and transforming the tech industry by accelerating product release cycles and streamlining onboarding processes.

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Chaos Engineering and Toil Automation: Ensuring Reliability and Efficiency

Chaos Engineering is the method of intentionally introducing bugs or faults into your system to evaluate its resilience. This practice is vital for assessing application health, but barriers to adoption persist due to an attached stigma that teams are “just breaking things on purpose.” Toil Automation, leveraged to automate non-value-add tasks, is central in SRE. It ensures the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of complex systems running digital services. However, automation maturity levels vary across several aspects of SRE.

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Observability and AIOps: Enhancing System Understanding

Observability involves capturing and understanding a system’s internal state through its external outputs while fostering swift issue detection and resolution. AIOps seamlessly combines AI and machine learning with IT operations, aiming to boost efficiency, reduce manual intervention, and optimize infrastructure.

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Platform Engineering: Abstracting Complexity for Developers

Streamlining Ideation to Creation: Embracing Platform Engineering

As the journey to DevOps maturity nears fruition in most companies, a new paradigm emerges—Platform Engineering. This shift empowers efficient and swift product delivery through self-service ecosystems, prioritization of simplicity, Innersource, and Developer Experience. However, challenges related to complexity and maintenance arise as platforms become more intricate and tailored to specific organizational needs.

Platform Engineering, through Platform Orchestrators like the Kubernetes Control Plane, abstracts away the knowledge required to manage containerized workloads, making life easier for developers. Treating platforms as true products and investing in Developer Experience (DX) and Open-source are essential for success.

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InnerSource: Fostering Collaboration within Organizations

InnerSource aims to create an environment where Open-source principles thrive within an organization’s internal software development processes. While facing challenges like cultural resistance, aligning InnerSource with business goals and ensuring leadership support can lead to successful adoption.

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Modern Engineering Tech Radar: Experimenting, Adapting, and Innovating

Trend Report Observations: Navigating Modern Engineering

GenAI Reshaping Modern Engineering

GenAI, despite legal concerns, is reshaping modern engineering. Tools like GitHub Co-pilot and ChatGPT highlight AI’s impact as a proactive assistant in coding tasks, from pair programming to prompt-based coding. The imminent transformation of the tech industry by AI is inevitable, with benefits ranging from faster product release cycles to enhanced skills development for developers.

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AI-Driven Testing

To further add to the GenAI revolution, AI-driven testing has simplified the release cycle of new software enhancements by automating all types of testing scripts. Functional, user acceptance, regression, and unit testing leverage AI models to automatically generate test scripts that pertain to the code written. This reduces the latency in the software development lifecycle and increases the time to market for new software features and fixes. Tools include ChatGPT and MS Copilot.

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Wardley Mapping

Wardley Maps provide organizations and teams an opportunity to map value chains and processes to achieve a desired state. This visualization can include everything from business strategy to solution architecture and organization modeling. Tools such as Miro and Mural allow teams to define a purpose, the scope of an initiative, the users involved, user needs, and a value chain to create a visual map for an initiative.

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Carbon-Efficient Development

Now more than ever, organizations are being judged on how much they have reduced or offset their carbon footprint. One of the ways this has been achieved in the last couple of years is migrating from on-premises data centers to the cloud. This reduces their carbon footprint by utilizing less servers and only using compute power when necessary for certain applications.

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Cloud FinOps: Maximizing Business Value in the Cloud

Cloud FinOps is a discipline and set of practices to maximize business value through collaborative working relationships on data-driven spending and optimization decisions. While making inroads in Fortune 500 companies, ensuring collaboration and continued cost tracking are key to its success.

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Conclusion: Navigating the Future of EngineeringOps

Our Tech Capability Trends Report serves as a comprehensive guide for CIOs and technology leaders navigating the ever-evolving landscape of EngineeringOps. As companies experiment, adapt, and innovate, the key to success lies in strategic adoption and continuous refinement of capabilities that streamline processes, enhance reliability, and drive business value. We invite your feedback and look forward to further exploring the limitless possibilities of technology in the years to come.

Drop me a message if you're interested in the full report. I can send it via email.