As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of companies (52%) say application development is a high priority initiative at their organization. But teams focused on building or improving apps face a number of bottlenecks — the three biggest of which are people, processes, and technology.

Puppet and Pulse surveyed 200 IT executives to discover how modern technologies and processes are helping app development teams overcome common roadblocks and adapt quickly to the changing economy.

App development is a high priority, but people are impacting processes

More than half (52%) of IT leaders agree that application development is of high importance right now—and only 3% say it’s low priority. Though the majority of teams are prioritizing application development, they’re facing bottlenecks preventing them from developing more quickly, efficiently, and successfully — the most significant of which is people (53%).

Which is the biggest bottleneck in your application development process?

Platform teams are increasing in popularity, but they don’t solve people-related bottlenecks

Over half of respondents say IT (81%), security (57%), and product (52%) teams are involved in application development, indicating these initiatives are becoming increasingly cross-functional.

Which teams are involved in application development at your company?

The vast majority (83%) of IT leaders say they’ve implemented a platform team model to handle the optimization of their platform infrastructure. These teams frequently span multiple internal departments. Platform teams reduce bottlenecks by enabling self-service to key technical capabilities, as well as ensure key technologies (such as infrastructure automation) are available to all facets of the business—increasing time to value.

Though platform teams are believed to streamline application development, the biggest bottleneck they’re facing is still related to people—namely, disjointed workflows (56%).

Which of the following bottlenecks does your platform team deal with?

Technology is making app development more powerful — and more complicated

Most respondents (86%) agree that using a range of tools adds power to application development, but makes processes and execution more complicated.

Of the IT executives who currently leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the bulk says the most important features of the process are configuration consistency (46%) and the minimization of risk (41%).

What is the most important feature of IaC?

In addition to IaC, the majority of tech leaders (61%) have implemented DevOps, which focuses on standardizing development environments and automating delivery processes to improve delivery predictability, efficiency, security, and maintainability.

Does your team use a DevOps application development method?

Respondent breakdown

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Data collected from June 23 – July 14, 2020. Respondents: 200 IT executives.