Gartner defines DevOps platforms as those that provide fully integrated and orchestrated capabilities to enable continuous delivery of software using agile and DevOps practices. The capabilities span the development and delivery life cycle built around the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, including planning, creation, artifact management, security, quality engineering, change management, compliance, environment management, deployment and monitoring. DevOps platforms support team collaboration, consistency, tool simplification and measurement of software delivery metrics. They are delivered primarily as cloud-hosted services with some options for on-premises deployment. DevOps platforms simplify the creation, maintenance and management of the components required for the delivery of various types of modern software. Platforms create common workflows and data models, simplify user access, provide production-like development and test environments, and provide a consistent user experience (UX) to reduce cognitive load. They lead to improved visibility, auditability and traceability for the software delivery value stream. This end-to-end view encourages a systems-thinking mindset and accelerates feedback loops. Organizations use DevOps platforms to minimize tool friction resulting from complex toolchains, manual handoffs and lack of consistent visibility throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). This enables product teams to deliver faster customer value without compromising quality. The DevOps platforms market reflects the consolidation of technologies across development, security, infrastructure and operations to streamline software delivery.
Gartner defines developer productivity insight platforms as solutions that provide software engineering leaders with data-driven visibility into the engineering team’s use of time and resources, operational effectiveness, and progress on deliverables. This enables software engineering leaders and their teams to make smarter business decisions, resulting in higher developer productivity. Developer productivity insight platforms must be capable of ingesting and analyzing the abundant data created by common engineering tools and systems. They must provide rich, tailored, and role-specific user experiences to help leaders more easily identify constraints, spot important trends, and gain contextual insights. Developer productivity insight platforms are used by software engineering leaders and their teams to better understand how software solutions are being built and delivered. Teams can more easily see where they are spending time, how they are approaching code quality (in the form of code reviews), and better understand team flow through key metrics like deployment frequency and cycle time. These platforms serve as a “single source of truth” for engineering process data, and provide a unified, comprehensive and transparent view of the engineering processes. Key engineering metrics for delivering digital products include team productivity and flow, business alignment, software quality, and operations effectiveness.
Value stream management platforms enable organizations to optimize end-to-end product delivery and improve business outcomes. VSMPs are tool-agnostic; they connect to existing tools and ingest data from all phases of software product delivery all the way from customer need to value delivery. They help software engineering leaders identify and quantify opportunities to improve software product performance by optimizing cost, operating models, technology and processes. VSMPs use AI-/machine learning (ML)-powered analytics and insights to surface constraints, detect bottlenecks and improve flow. This enables stakeholders to take actions that improve throughput and align to business priorities and objectives.