Happy Developers Produce More Secure Software, Better Business Outcomes

The results are in: happy developers working in teams with mature DevSecOps practices produce more secure software.

The 2020 DevSecOps Community Survey is our seventh annual investigation into DevSecOps  trends. It is the first survey to confirm in the software world what is known in businesses generally: employee job satisfaction is crucial for success. Other studies have shown that happy employees master broader competencies and their brains are 31% more productive, among many other benefits.

Our survey, in conjunction with our research partners Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, CloudBees, DevOps Institute, DevOps.com, DevSecOps Days, NowSecure, Security Boulevard, Verica, and All Day DevOps, surveyed 5,045 developers in 102 countries. It showed that development velocity continues to speed up, with 55% of respondents saying they deploy code to production at least once a week, up from 47% saying the same thing last year. 

Happy Developers Offer Measurable Advantages 

Most interesting this year was our discovery of how happiness correlates with mature DevSecOps practices and more secure code outcomes. Respondents who we designate as “happy” are nearly twice as likely to:

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• say they like their job (1.7x more likely)
• get work done (1.7x more likely)
• encourage friends to come work with them (1.8x more likely)

Mature DevOps teams demonstrate 1.6x higher job satisfaction rates compared to their immature peers. Furthermore, mature teams are 2.2x more likely to invest in container security (CSA), 2.1x more likely to invest in dynamic testing (DAST) and 1.9x more likely to invest in Software Composition Analysis (SCA).

Here are some of the positive correlations we uncovered:

Happy Developers Pay More Attention to Security

Happy developers are 3.6x less likely to neglect security when it comes to code quality, (Read more...)