Research finds that the highest performing teams are shipping updates 3x faster than those in the bottom quartile
CircleCI, a leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, today published its sixth annual State of Software Delivery report. Based on the analysis of nearly 15 million workflows of teams building on CircleCI, the report delves into how advancements like CI/CD automation, infrastructure as code, and AI-powered developer tools have raised the floor for what it means to be good at delivering software.
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Chart 1
This year's data reveals a stark divide between high and low performing software teams. The top 25% of high performing teams are:
- Shipping updates 3x as fast as teams in the bottom quartile, turning development velocity into market advantage.
- Saving millions in annual development costs by completing critical workflows 5x faster than low performers, freeing resources for strategic initiatives.
- Reclaiming thousands of hours of innovation time each year by debugging in minutes rather than days, keeping developers in the flow and focused on value creation.
"The top performing teams represented in this year's report clearly see being great at software delivery as a strategic advantage," said Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. "AI is changing how software is created at a rate we've never seen before. Instead of trying to predict what the world of software will look like in five years, focus on building a culture that can quickly adapt to constant change CI/CD is a core part of this."
The report's data analyzes specific developer productivity metrics year over year, including workflow duration, throughput, recovery speed, and success rate, to evaluate benchmarks for developers. It also provides tools and next steps for improving performance on all four metrics. While some developer teams exceeded some metrics, they didn't meet others -- however, the highest performing developers routinely met or exceeded metrics in chart 1, "summary of 2025 software delivery metrics."
"IDC's most recent DevOps survey revealed that more than 70% of organizations consider their DevOps strategy a driver of high or extremely high business value, reflecting a trend towards more accountability for business outcomes," said Jim Mercer, IDC's Program Vice President, Software Development, DevOps DevSecOps. "It's nice to see organizations recognize the importance of DevOps, but it puts more pressure on these teams to improve the value they provide to the business by leveraging modern developer and DevOps tools that can enable them to build the intelligent applications of the future."
The State of Software Delivery research also breaks down software delivery metrics by industry in chart 2, "summary of 2025 software delivery metrics by industry." Despite differences in challenges each industry grapples with, one constant remains: the ability to deliver high-quality software quickly is a competitive advantage.
The full 2025 State of Software Delivery report is now available to download. Ready to invest in better software delivery? Sign up for free to get started in minutes.
Methodology
The 2025 State of Software Delivery Report analyzes data from nearly 15 million workflows from over 22,000 organizations in 149 countries. The data was collected within the first 28 days of September 2024.
About CircleCI
CircleCI is a leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, enabling more than two million global users on elite engineering teams like Okta, Hinge, and Hugging Face to rapidly build, test, deploy, and monitor software they can trust. Through powerful pipeline automation, CircleCI manages limitless complexity at scale through unmatched flexibility and reliability, reducing the time from build to delivery by 3x the industry average. For more information about CircleCI, visit www.circleci.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
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Contacts:
press@circleci.com
