How CI/CD Reshapes Developer and Operations Roles: Findings from the 2020 Global DevSecOps Survey

DevOps and CI/CD accelerate code delivery, but they also bring significant shifts in the responsibilities of developers and operations staff; when used correctly, they enable cleaner code and faster releases.

The 2020 Global DevSecOps survey uncovered subtle benefits: CI/CD allows developers to accomplish more while doing less, as automation dramatically reduces manual tasks, leading to evolving and sometimes drastic role changes for both Dev and Ops.

According to the survey, 83% of developers say they release code faster than ever, with nearly 60% deploying multiple times per day or every few days—a 15‑point increase from 2019. About 21% added CI to their processes last year, while only 15% practiced continuous deployment.

Respondents highlighted clear advantages of CI/CD, such as automated pipelines that combine proprietary and open‑source tools for building, testing, and deploying code; automatic testing and deployment after code‑review approval; templated processes that speed up multi‑cloud, multi‑environment deployments; and one‑click testing and deployment that reduce build time and eliminate environment issues.

Developers no longer need to perform manual testing, manual merges, or coordinate code across multiple developers; Git handles merging, and automation removes the need for manual deployment, code‑style debates, and dependency updates.

Operations teams also report major changes: nearly 40% of respondents say most of their development lifecycle is automated, allowing them to focus on cloud‑service management rather than hardware and infrastructure, with many now configuring their own environments.

Role boundaries are blurring—over a third of developers now define or create the infrastructure their applications run on, and 14% monitor and respond to that infrastructure, tasks traditionally belonging to Ops; almost 70% of Ops professionals say developers can configure their own environments.

Only about half of developers conduct weekly code reviews, and many teams aim to shift testing left, write more comprehensive test cases, and improve the speed and quality of code reviews.

The survey suggests that teams should invest in more automated testing across all test types (functional, A/B, unit, security) and continue to refine CI/CD pipelines to free up “idle time” for higher‑value work.

For further reading, the article links to the full GitLab DevSecOps report and related resources such as GitLab CI practice collections and Jenkins pipeline guides.