Software developers are spending most of their time being dragged into ‘war rooms’ to solve application performance issues, rather than investing their time developing new software applications as part of their organization’s innovation strategy, according to a report by Cisco.

Software developers are spending more than 57 per cent of their time being dragged into ‘war rooms’, while globally nearly 85 per cent of those surveyed reported encountering increased pressure to accelerate release velocity, while 77 per cent pointed to mounting pressure to deliver seamless and secure digital experiences.

While developers are being expected to deliver new tools and functionality at ever faster speeds, they also find themselves on the receiving end of endless demands to help Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and IT operations teams manage the ongoing availability and performance of applications. The result is teams of developers spending hours in war room meetings and debugging applications, instead of creating code and building new applications.

Developers are acutely concerned about the potential consequences this could have, with three quarters (75%) of those surveyed fearing that the lack of visibility and insight into IT performance is increasing the chances of their organisation suffering downtime and disruption to business-critical applications.

The situation is significantly affecting morale amongst developers, with 82 per cent admitting that they feel frustrated and demotivated, and 54% increasingly inclined to leave their current job.

“While most IT departments have deployed a multitude of monitoring tools across different domains, they simply fall short when it comes to today’s complex and dynamic IT environments, leaving technologists unable to generate a full and unified view into their applications and the supporting IT stack,” said Shannon McFarland, Vice President, Cisco DevNet. “When things go wrong, it’s incredibly difficult to quickly identify where the root cause lies, often resulting in panic war room situations and developers having to spend hours trying to help their colleagues in IT operations identify the quickest path to remediation,” McFarland added.

However, developers are acutely aware that there are solutions available to address these concerns, and as many as 91% feel that they should be playing a bigger role in shaping and deciding on the solutions needed within their organization.

While developers themselves may not be the primary users of full-stack observability solutions – focusing instead on their specific areas of domain expertise – 78 per cent believe that implementing full-stack observability within their organization would be beneficial.

Alongside full-stack observability, many developers (39%) also feel that their organization (and they themselves) would benefit from deploying AI to automate application issue detection and resolution. Rather than relying on manual processes, AI can enable IT teams to cut through overwhelming volumes of application data to identify the most serious issues and apply fixes in real-time.

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