[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":791},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/gitlab-release-process":3,"navigation-en-us":33,"banner-en-us":433,"footer-en-us":443,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Dmitriy Zaporozhets":685,"blog-related-posts-en-us-gitlab-release-process":699,"assessment-promotions-en-us":741,"next-steps-en-us":781},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":22,"isFeatured":12,"meta":23,"navigation":24,"path":25,"publishedDate":20,"seo":26,"stem":30,"tagSlugs":31,"__hash__":32},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/gitlab-release-process.yml","Gitlab Release Process",[7],"dmitriy-zaporozhets",null,"insights",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"gitlab-release-process",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9},"How we managed 49 monthly releases","In this article I’ll give you an overview of how we release our product and how it helps our team improve process and documentation.",[18],"Dmitriy Zaporozhets","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749684538/Blog/Hero%20Images/leavesonbranch.png","2015-12-17","\n\nSince October 2011 we’ve released GitLab each month, without fail, without exceptions. On December 22nd that will be 49 monthly releases, not including patch releases or security releases. In this article I’ll give you an overview of how we release our product and how it helps our team improve process and documentation.\n\nYour release strategy affects how you plan, develop, test, and publish your software. At GitLab we follow a monthly release cycle which works really well for our project. If you’re running an open source distributed software project, you might consider if a predictable time-based release can help your project. You can even get started by using our release cycle documentation as your template.\n\n\u003C!-- more -->\n\n## Why time-based release cycles?\n\nTime-based releases make absolute sense if you develop distributed software. Take for example Apple macOS. They have a fixed release date, everyone knows when it will be coming out. With distributed software, users need to be prepared for a release. Another advantage is that it builds anticipation for the software release.\n\nIf you have SaaS type services, they don’t need a fixed release date. People are already using the software so it’s a matter of delivering features as soon as they are ready.\n\nAn open source project isn’t only you, working on your own. Even from very early on GitLab was always collaborative. The truth is, I’m a lazy person. I like to have lots of fun, and I always have stuff to do whether it’s playing video games or hanging out with friends. It’s actually a hack to deal with myself. You need some discipline or schedule, otherwise you will always find some reason to delay. A certain date makes it easier.\n\nThis has been a popular method in some open source projects. At the time I started GitLab I was inspired by Ubuntu’s [time based releases](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases). I was always anticipating their next release, and this was inspiring. Ubuntu's time-based cycle was heavily influenced by the release process [used by the GNOME project](http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/TimeBased). Both of those projects follow a six month cycle generally. We follow a one month cycle.\n\n## Why monthly cycles?\n\nIn some ways the date and duration of a cycle is arbitrary. People ask me “Why is it on the 22nd?” perhaps expecting there is some meaning in the number. Actually, it was just the date of the previous release when we decided to make it monthly.\n\nBy choosing monthly it greatly simplifies communication. A bi-monthly release could cause confusion (\"Was it last month or the one before?\") and longer cycles could mean stagnation in development. Another advantage is that a short cycle keeps you focused on smaller iterations, and getting feedback quickly. It’s easier to test and see what is not working, and easier to roll back changes. This is the most awesome part of time-based release cycles.\n\nSometimes what happens on larger projects and teams is that people can be working in parallel and might be duplicating effort without knowing it. Someday, a manager might come to you and say “Yeah… we decided not to ship that feature you were working on. Someone else on another team was working on something similar, and your feature no longer makes sense.” That’s unfortunately a common experience.\n\nA short release cycle doesn’t allow you to work for a long time between when you create a feature and get feedback. It prevents people from losing their focus.\n\n## How do we organize who works on what and when?\n\nInstead of one person assigning tasks to team members, the team members pick up tasks from the pool. This is an [Agile practice](/solutions/agile-delivery/) which gives greater autonomy to the members of the team. You work on what you want to from the pool within the goals of the project.\n\nThe leaders define the direction. They work on the pool and define the milestones. We do work on large features, but these are split up into tasks. Our release priorities are published in our [Direction document in the Handbook](/direction/), and everyone on the team can see the current milestones we’re tracking against.\n\nWe do have some things which are high priority and which must be worked on first, such as security issues and priority features. After that, it’s a matter of what you want to work on yourself. This process of selecting issues and prioritization is outlined in our GitLab Handbook, under [GitLab Workflow](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#gitlab-workflow). For example, “Assign an issue to yourself as soon as you start to work on it, but not before that time.” If an issue is assigned to someone, someone is working on it. If it’s not assigned to someone, no one is working on it. If it’s assigned to a milestone, there’s commitment to work on it. This also makes it easier for everyone on the team to collaborate. Having a manager to bring this distributed effort to release is very important.\n\n## The Release Manager is a role, not a person\n\nIn most software development projects a release process is followed by a team lead who delegates tasks. If there is always one person doing it, it’s not always documented. Also, you rely on that one person being available. We can’t wait if someone is sick or on vacation to get our release out. Having one person managing a release is a potential single point of failure.\n\nFor a long time, I managed all the releases. As soon as we had more people on our team at GitLab, I was able to hand this task over to others. Now we rotate the role of release management to a new appointed member each month. This means we don’t have one person who is always in charge of releases.\n\nThe benefits of making the Release Manager a role and not a person don’t stop at improving reliability, it also means a better process over all. When you pass the role to other people, a new person can contribute new ideas or improvements, for example to the process or documentation. The release itself becomes an object of collaboration. If a new person can follow along, we know the documentation is where it needs to be.\n\nThe release process is a good experience for any member of the team. It gives you a wider overview of the entire pipeline. Being a Release Manager requires that you collaborate with developers, operations, marketing, sales -- every aspect of the company. It’s a great way for you to get to know the entire team.\n\n## What does the Release Manager do?\n\nEach month the Release Manager is appointed to follow the release process which begins 7 business days prior to the release date. That person stays the Release Manager until the end of their cycle and the next Release Manager initiates the next release. The monthly release process is outlined in [our documentation](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-tools/blob/master/README.md).\n\nIt’s up to the Release Manager to delegate and coordinate activity among the team members, and to ensure everyone is up-to-date. They create an issue in the GitLab CE project, and use the `monthly.md` file as a template. This generates a checklist which the Release Manager updates as the release progresses. Finally, the Release Manager also appoints the next Release Manager who will initiate the next cycle.\n\n![Example monthly release checklist GitLab 8.3](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/monthly-release-checklist.jpg)\n\n## What are the steps towards release?\n\nSix business days before the 22nd, the first release candidates are created for CE and EE. After that, the team is testing and doing QA on the release. Four days before the release, we deploy to GitLab.com and test further. In the final days before the release we are working on building packages and preparing the blog post, which includes selecting a contributor MVP for the [GitLab Hall of Fame](https://contributors.gitlab.com/docs/notable-contributorsindex.html).\n\nFinally, we release GitLab at 12am CET (Central European Time) of the 22nd. This ensures we have enough time during the European work day to address any issues that might arise.\n\n## What happens after a release?\n\nAs part of the release process, we have a regression issue where people point out functionality that may have been broken by the new release. We create fixes for issues as they arise, and prepare a patch release. Patch releases have no schedule. One might be released within 24 hours if it relates to security or data loss. We don’t want to do too many patch releases, especially because soon the next release will be coming out. It’s up to the Release Manager to decide how to handle this.\n\nIn the past we’ve held team calls to celebrate, but this can be interrupted. Even right after we deploy the release and publish the blog post there’s more work to do, small things to fix, and patch releases to prepare. I always celebrate it at home. I recommend you get a good bottle of beer, toast your teammates, and enjoy the moment. You probably want to spend some time with your friends and family after the intensity of a release.\n\n## Does this have an advantage for open source projects?\n\nMost open source projects don’t follow this strict release process. This means it’s up to the leaders to decide when it’s time to release.\n\nI’ve contributed code to other open source projects, and when I see upstream issues that are important but not released I start wondering. If there are people specifically asking “Can you release a new version?” then I’m very skeptical about these projects. I don’t trust any project that doesn't know when the next release is coming out.\n\nPeople can trust open source projects which have a stable release schedule. It’s a sign of a healthy project which is actively developed. I do feel that for open source projects, developing a timed release process is the best option for distributed software. And I now know, it’s something that people love about GitLab.\n\nIn January we’re going to have our 50th monthly release of our project. 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we overhauled GitLab navigation","Users weren't getting what they needed from our navigation. Here are the steps we took to turn that experience around.",[705],"Ashley Knobloch","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749682884/Blog/Hero%20Images/navigation.jpg","2023-08-15","\nGitLab navigation was complex and confusing - that was the message we received from our users through issues and other feedback channels. Initially, to address these concerns, we conducted research around proposed solutions, but quickly found they wouldn't help users achieve their goals well enough to warrant implementing them. In the process of learning what wasn't working and what wouldn't work, we still didn't have clarity around *why* the navigation wasn't working. This article chronicles our journey to finding that clarity and developing navigation that is easier to use and better suited to our users' needs.\n\n## Our approach\nAs a first step, we reviewed past research and user feedback to ensure we had a solid understanding of what we had done and learned already. We found that we still needed more insight into why proposed changes weren’t receiving enough positive feedback to implement them.\n\nOur goals were straightforward:\n- understand what users are doing in GitLab\n- study how they navigate the platform\n- learn why they need certain navigation elements\n\nOur perspective shifted from validating proposed solutions to going back to revalidate the problems that exist with our navigation experience. Our hypothesis was that with a deeper understanding of our users’ behavior and mental models for how they navigate around GitLab, we could develop concepts to better match their needs and improve their overall experience.\n\nThe scope of features in GitLab and the number of user personas across GitLab made this challenging. We have [16 personas](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/personas/#user-personas) to represent different types of users, all with unique goals and techniques to achieve those goals. We focused our efforts on a subset of those personas that best represented usage across GitLab to ensure a holistic understanding of different user needs. We wanted to learn how navigation among different personas was similar and where it differed, what worked well with the current navigation, and what challenges users faced.\n\n## Studying key persona cohorts\nWe conducted [diary studies](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/ux/ux-research/diary-studies/) with cohorts of our key personas to learn what their primary tasks and workflows were at a deeper level. This provided us with many real-world examples of how they navigate to their tasks and why. We also learned what worked well with their current workflows, what pain points existed, and what workarounds were being used (such as creating browser bookmarks, typing in the URL to pull browser history, or keeping a bunch of browser tabs open) to streamline their tasks in GitLab.\n\nWe learned that for some users, many of their primary tasks don’t require much navigation within GitLab because they use outside tools that link into GitLab through notifications (e.g., Slack and email) or use direct links through other tools. We also learned that often users’ work is quite scoped in GitLab, and they would like easier access to some of their core features without having to wade through all of the other features they don’t use. This illuminated some unmet needs that would improve their workflows, such as having the ability to customize navigation to access things important to them more quickly and streamline their path to relevant projects.\n\nLearning more about our users from a foundational perspective ensured that we had a solid base to build upon when considering changes to the navigation.\n\n## Anchoring to a North Star\nTo anchor the redesign process in user problems more broadly, a review of past feedback was analyzed that revealed three overarching themes with navigation-related feedback. These themes helped to guide the process and to remind us of the key problems we were trying to solve:\n- minimize feeling overwhelmed (ability to customize left sidebar)\n- orient users across the platform (differentiating groups and projects)\n- pick up where you left off (switching contexts)\n\nThe team continually mapped back design concepts to these themes to ensure potential solutions were rooted in user problems.\n\n## Evaluating and iterating\nNext, several navigation design concepts were developed and shared with users for feedback. Multiple rounds of [solution validation testing](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/ux/ux-research/solution-validation-and-methods/) were conducted with our key personas to determine which design concepts to move forward with. The testing revealed how users felt about each design and also how well each design supported users completing core tasks. We identified a final concept that supported mature and new GitLab users with common workflows.\n\n## Understanding mental models for sidebar organization\nWe wanted to revisit our groupings in the left sidebar because we’ve heard over time that the organization can be confusing and unintuitive, especially some categories such as Operations. We needed to understand our users’ mental models for how they would group these items, and why. Learning the thought processes behind their organization was critical for us to know what changes to make that would align with user expectations.\n\nWe ran facilitated [card sort](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/ux/ux-research/mental-modeling/#card-sorting) studies with our key personas to understand how they would group items in the left sidebar, and why. This helped us learn some areas that could benefit from readjusting, such as the Manage and Operate categories. We learned that users most often preferred to have analytics items together, for example, which is reflected in the Analyze tab. This insight, combined with patterns in analytics data, informed changes to the groupings in the left sidebar to better support workflows.\n\n## Launching and learning\nPrior to launching to external users, the new navigation was released to internal team members and we collected [feedback](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/403059) to help iterate and improve the experience.\n\nNext, we launched the new navigation to external users as a toggle that could be turned on optionally. During this initial launch, a [longitudinal study](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/ux/ux-research/longitudinal-studies/) was conducted with a sample of GitLab users to learn how they experienced the change in the context of their real work. Over time, the study would provide insight into adoption among the entire user base.\n\nWe interviewed users prior to the monthlong study to learn more about their experience with the existing navigation. Then, they began using the new navigation while completing surveys and participating in interviews at checkpoints in the beginning, middle, and end of the month. This enabled us to capture their initial impressions of the new navigation, what they liked/disliked, how the new experience compared to the previous one, and if their sentiment changed over the course of the month as they continued to use the new navigation.\n\nUsers in this study found the new navigation to be an improvement from the previous one, and most preferred its features, including:\n- the ability to pin items streamlined common workflows\n- the new task-based sidebar categories in the sidebar, which they said felt more approachable, especially for newer users\n- the new navigation changes, which they said weren’t too overwhelming and felt familiar\n\nWe also learned about some opportunities to iterate and improve the new experience. For instance, some users pointed out:\n- the inability to pin entire Projects, Groups, or specific pages makes it difficult to streamline other workflows\n- some users unpin items accidentally\n- the overall lack of color can cause some features to blend in or be missed\n- it's not always easy to know what’s new in GitLab\n\n## What’s next: Iterate, listen, and iterate again\nTo capture large-scale feedback on navigation over time, we launched a new navigation-focused quarterly survey in Q1 (February) of this year. This first quarter data established a baseline of our old navigation, and beginning in Q2 (May), we began collecting data on the new navigation experience. We will monitor this closely, and look for themes to help us learn what is working well and what may need further iteration.\n\nThis survey, along with our longitudinal study feedback and various other user feedback sources, will provide insights to help prioritize iterative improvements to the new navigation experience. Stay tuned for changes, and keep sharing [your navigation feedback](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/409005) with us!\n",[710,711,712],"inside GitLab","UX","research",{"slug":714,"featured":12,"template":13},"navigation-research-blog-post",{"content":716,"config":726},{"title":717,"description":718,"authors":719,"heroImage":721,"date":722,"body":723,"category":9,"tags":724},"Beautifying our UI: Giving GitLab build features a fresh look","Get an inside look at how we are improving the usability of GitLab build features with multiple visual design improvements.",[720],"Veethika Mishra","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749682807/Blog/Hero%20Images/beautify.jpg","2023-07-05","\n\nThe current technical landscape is completely different from what it was this time last year. As the software development industry is busy evolving its understanding of _automating early and often_ in the presence of new AI capabilities, we have been focused on feature work. However, it's equally important to make sure we are adapting our UI to match up to the experience and addressing, where necessary, the misalignment between the two.\n\nIn a scaling product, where issues are competing to be prioritized, it might feel convenient to tackle the next feature issue as opposed to focusing on small visual design improvements. Advocating for the value that a small visual design change in isolation brings to the product is never easy for all the practical reasons, and this is where [the \"Beautifying our UI\" initiative](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/ux/product-design/#beautifying-our-ui) becomes useful at GitLab. It allows a product designer and a frontend engineer to voluntarily pair up, like we did, and make self-directed improvements to the usability of GitLab.\n\nWe collaborated on many pipeline-related features in the past three years. As our responsibilities pulled us in different directions, we had to put many of our aspirational plans for improving the presentation of CI/CD features in GitLab on hold in favor of other more important things.\n\nHowever, once those were addressed, we decided to volunteer for a session of Beautifying our UI in the 16.1 milestone. To make the most of a single milestone, we began preparing a couple months in advance, soliciting ideas from team members and getting the design proposals ready in [an issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/394768/). After a quick prioritization exercise to understand which of the suggested improvements would be most meaningful to our users, we made a number of contributions to the product.\n\nHere are some of those contributions:\n\n### Improvement to pipeline detail page\nIn the process of troubleshooting a failing pipeline, users often have to visit their detail page for better insight into what's causing the failure. The top of the page previously had a table with all the metadata around that pipeline. Over the years, a lot of information was added to this table but the layout was never optimized to accommodate that information, which in return impacted the usability of the page. The page headers were also very different from other examples found in GitLab.\n\nBy critically looking at every piece of information displayed on the page, we made informed decisions using the qualitative insights and the usage data at hand to completely redesign the pipeline header.\n\n![image of pipeline detail page before](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/Beautifying-of-our-ui-16-1/pipeline-detail-before.png)\nBefore\n\n\n![image of pipeline detail page after making changes](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/Beautifying-of-our-ui-16-1/pipeline-detail-after.png)\nAfter\n\n\nThis work was substantial and while we did our best to avoid any negative impact to our users, we realize there might be a few issues. Please share your comments in this [feedback issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/414756) about the redesign and we'll prioritize addressing them.\n\nRedesigning the pipeline header came with a few technical challenges because a lot of the code was a mix between HAML and Vue. We had to slowly refactor the pipeline header over to Vue/GraphQL to allow our code to be more performant and maintainable. It’s pretty much like building a completely new feature — we had to get creative with passing data to the Vue app from Rails.\n\n### Harmonizing badges and link styles on pipeline list view\nThe pipeline index page (list view) is one of the most visited pages in GitLab because users need to make sure any failing pipelines are identified quickly for troubleshooting. Since there's a lot going on on this page, it is critical that the UI leads users' attention to the right areas. Previously, almost every link presented in the pipeline column had a different visual treatment, which made the page visually noisy and harmed the usability and scannability of the information. Our goal was to remove anything that isn't required and harmonize the visual language so it is easy for CI/CD users to perform their jobs effectively.\n\n![image of pipeline detail page before](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/Beautifying-of-our-ui-16-1/pipeline-index-page-before.png)\nBefore\n\n\n\n![image of pipeline detail page after making changes](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/Beautifying-of-our-ui-16-1/pipeline-index-page-after.png)\nAfter\n\n\n### Linking runner number to runner admin page\nTo allow easy management of runners across an instance, we've now provided easy access to the runner admin page right from the job detail page. Previously a static test, now the runner number can directly take users with the runner admin page where they can make changes to the specific runner's configuration.\n\n![image of cancel pipeline label](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/Beautifying-of-our-ui-16-1/runner-link-from-job-logs.png)\nLinking runner admin page from job logs page\n\n\n### Improving tooltips and button text\nThe tooltips on the jobs list view were using native browser tooltips. We've changed those to use a design-system-compliant tooltip for consistency and better readability.\n\nWe gathered some useful feedback on the usability of the button labels and took this as an opportunity to improve a few of them. Here's one example where we changed the label text for the button for canceling a running pipeline from **Cancel running** to **Cancel pipeline** and added an appropriate tooltip to clearly communicate the action.\n\n![image of cancel pipeline label](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/Beautifying-of-our-ui-16-1/cancel-pipeline-label.png)\nButton with new label text\n\n\n## More to come\nWe are not stopping with this list! We will continue our partnership to bring in more visual and usability improvements to the continuous integration area in the coming months. If you are interested in taking a look at the complete list of changes we have made and the ones we still plan to make, [you can find the issue here](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/394768/).\n\n\n",[711,725],"design",{"slug":727,"featured":12,"template":13},"beautifying-of-our-ui",{"content":729,"config":739},{"title":730,"description":731,"authors":732,"heroImage":734,"date":735,"body":736,"category":9,"tags":737},"4 best practices leading orgs to release software faster","GitLab's 2023 Global DevSecOps Survey illuminates the strategies that organizations deploying more frequently have in common.",[733],"Kristina Weis","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749663908/Blog/Hero%20Images/2023-devsecops-report-blog-banner2.png","2023-06-08","\nReleasing software faster is one of the biggest goals of many organizations — and for good reason. It helps them keep up with competitors, land and keep more customers, improve employee satisfaction, and much more. But maintaining that velocity requires investment in processes and technologies that help DevSecOps teams deliver, secure, and deploy software faster without compromising quality.\n\nIn our [2023 Global DevSecOps Survey](https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/) we asked more than 5,000 development, security, and operations professionals about everything from deployment frequency to the practices teams have adopted – all to learn what the most agile and efficient organizations have in common. One respondent, a director of IT security in the retail sector, summed up the challenge as follows: “Software customers are increasingly vocal and demanding, expecting faster releases and greater customizability. Developers will need to keep up with these demands while still maintaining stability and usability.”\n\nSo what’s helping organizations be more productive and efficient? Here are four of the best practices that, according to the survey, help organizations release software faster and deploy more frequently:\n\n## 1. Running applications in the cloud\nOne of the benefits people commonly attribute to deploying to the cloud is increased development speed. As it turns out, this year’s survey shows there’s some serious truth to that. Respondents with at least a quarter of their applications in the cloud were 2.2 times more likely to be releasing software faster than they were a year ago — and respondents with at least half of their applications in the cloud were 4.2 times more likely to deploy to production multiple times per day.\n\nSeveral respondents commented on the value of the cloud while also acknowledging the complexities cloud computing can bring to software development. An IT operations manager in the industrial manufacturing sector shared that “developing software that is designed for the cloud-native environment” is one of the top challenges facing software development this year. Likewise, an IT operations manager in the telecommunications sector said: “With the increase in the use of cloud computing and IoT devices, there is a greater need for secure coding practices to protect sensitive data from cyber attacks.” As organizations move to a cloud-first model for software development, they will need to adopt technologies that allow them to build natively in the cloud while keeping security top of mind throughout the development process.\n\n## 2. BizDevOps\nThough DevOps and DevSecOps mostly steal the show in terms of methodologies, some organizations go a step further and [practice BizDevOps](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/a-snapshot-of-modern-devops-practices-today/) — that is, incorporating business teams alongside development, security, and operations teams. An IT operations manager in the software sector emphasized the importance of collaboration with the business, sharing that “as software projects become larger and more complex, developers will need to work closely with other team members, including designers, testers, project managers, and business stakeholders.” This approach appears to be paying off for some: Respondents whose organizations practice BizDevOps were 1.4 times more likely to be releasing software faster than they were a year ago.\n\n## 3. CI/CD\nIt’s not surprising that automating the software development lifecycle with [CI/CD](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/) would help teams release software faster and more efficiently; however, it’s nice to see confirmation and put some numbers to the difference it can make. The survey shows that respondents [practicing CI/CD](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-to-keep-up-with-ci-cd-best-practices/) were twice as likely to deploy multiple times per day and 1.2 times more likely to release software faster than they did a year ago.\n\nDespite the value of CI/CD for driving efficiency, respondents also identified challenges. For instance, an IT operations associate in the aerospace/defense sector pointed to “management that doesn't understand CI/CD at all” as a blocker to more efficient software development. Meanwhile, a software development intern in the biotech sector shared that “tools to automate CI/CD, together with code editors, APM software, and defect trackers, can help with a faster and quality development cycle,” but “companies are hesitant to spend on tools that can help increase their developers’ productivity.” These responses underscore the value of investing in tools that unify CI/CD with other DevSecOps practices — such as incorporating security early in the development process and creating tighter feedback loops — to help organizations break down development silos.\n\n## 4. DORA and other metrics\nOrganizations that [make a conscious effort to track key development metrics](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-zoopla-uses-dora-metrics-and-your-team-can-too/) are more likely to improve them, according to the survey. This makes sense because by virtue of an organization choosing to track a metric, they’re signaling to their teams that it’s important, likely reminding them of whether the metric is improving (or not) periodically, and quite possibly prioritizing initiatives aimed at improving those metrics. We found that respondents whose organizations track their [DORA metrics](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/dora_metrics.html) and other similar metrics were 1.4 times more likely to deploy multiple times per day.\n\n## A deeper dive on productivity and efficiency\n\nFor a deeper look into release velocity and deployment frequency, and all the practices that made respondents more likely to release software faster and deploy multiple times per day, check out our [2023 DevSecOps Report: Productivity & Efficiency Within Reach](https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/).\n\nThe report also digs into two other key factors that can have a big impact on productivity and efficiency: how long it takes to onboard new developers and how difficult or easy it is for organizations to attract, hire, and retain developers. We’ll show you where things stand and the practices that made respondents more likely to be successful.\n\n_[Read the highlights from “Security Without Sacrifices,” the first report in our 2023 Global DevSecOps Report series.](/blog/gitlab-survey-highlights-wins-challenges-as-orgs-adopt-devsecops/)_\n",[738,102,558,550],"developer survey",{"slug":740,"featured":12,"template":13},"best-practices-leading-orgs-to-release-software-faster",{"promotions":742},[743,757,769],{"id":744,"categories":745,"header":747,"text":748,"button":749,"image":754},"ai-modernization",[746],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":750,"config":751},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":752,"dataGaName":753,"dataGaLocation":237},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":755},{"src":756},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":758,"categories":759,"header":761,"text":748,"button":762,"image":766},"devops-modernization",[760,553],"product","Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":763,"config":764},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":765,"dataGaName":753,"dataGaLocation":237},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":767},{"src":768},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":770,"categories":771,"header":773,"text":748,"button":774,"image":778},"security-modernization",[772],"security","Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":775,"config":776},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":777,"dataGaName":753,"dataGaLocation":237},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":779},{"src":780},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"header":782,"blurb":783,"button":784,"secondaryButton":789},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":785,"config":786},"Get your free trial",{"href":787,"dataGaName":44,"dataGaLocation":788},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":489,"config":790},{"href":48,"dataGaName":49,"dataGaLocation":788},1772652071332]