Dive Brief:

• The majority of developers (84%) said their teams are prevented from deploying more often, blaming quality assurance and testing for the delays, according to the Rollbar 2021 State of Software Code Report released Wednesday, which surveyed 950 developers and engineers. 

• To deploy faster, 40% of developers said the top improvement they want are better tools to detect and fix code errors, while 38% said better project management. Bigger teams or budgets was the top ask for 36% and 30% of developers, respectively.

• "Software is never perfect, and the pursuit of perfection acts as a barrier to iteration and innovation," Cory Virok, CTO and co-founder at Rollbar, said in a statement.

Dive Insight:

For developers, remote work has aided productivity. Forty-three percent of developers said their team's deployment velocity increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Harness’ State of Developer Satisfaction report in August.

Many companies plan to keep those development teams remote. Three-quarters of respondents said their organizations plan to maintain a remote or distributed developer workforce after COVID-19 eases up, according to the Harness report. 

The enterprise relied on speedy deployments for business continuity during disruption. The quick response maintained digital service delivery and supported a dispersed workforce. 

"Organizations that rely on software – which is to say every organization – must introduce and iterate on code quickly to be competitive," said Holger Mueller, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research. "Developers often get stuck in the weeds trying to perfect code. But new tools now enable developers to do more releases more often." 

Low-code/no-code tools aided organizations in deploying clean code quickly. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, QuickBase reported helping 300 customers build more than 750 applications to respond to disruption, CIO Dive reported in June. 

Non-technical employees can use low code/no code to digitize manual processes, such as HR spreadsheets or financial management. 

For developers, low-code deployments provide a clean foundation of code. 

Application development can take a long time when coding from scratch, but low-code tools provide a foundation to start from. Low-code platforms provide the underlying code infrastructure so that developers can redirect their technical knowledge toward more challenging problems. 

"As a developer, you don't have to worry about the plumbing," Kyle Tuberson, CTO, public sector, at ICF told CIO Dive earlier this month.