DevOps and security tooling makes developers happy, a new report by Sonoatype claims – though curiously those happier developers are more likely to see other developers as a source of friction.

The report found that when it came to the adoption of DevOps practices, 49 per cent of the 5,000 plus respondents were at the “immature” stage, with 36 per cent “improving” and 15 per cent classed as “mature”.

Consequently, 55 per cent deployed at least weekly, with 11 per cent managing multiples times per day, 7 per cent “with every change”.

There was a stark difference in the level of integration of security tools for “immature” DevOps teams, with barely a quarter using container security analysis, compared to 57 per cent of mature teams. Data loss prevention was used by half of mature teams, and just 21 per cent of immature teams. Overall, mature teams were twice as likely as immature teams to “properly integrate automated security tools”.

Or splitting on another metric, two thirds of happy developers said their team performed security analysis of its code, while the reverse applied for grumpy developers.

Sticking with the happiness metric, Sonatype concluded job satisfaction was higher in mature DevOps practices, with 92 per cent of devs in such teams declaring themselves satisfied, compared to 61 per cent of those in immature groups.

Meanwhile, “happy” developers were more likely to be kept informed of app security issues by automated tooling – 60 per cent versus 47 per cent – while grumpy developers were four times likely to pick up security issues by rumour (19 percent) compared to happy developers.

How is a happy developer defined? Sonatype said “we combined several attributes of survey respondents” including job satisfaction, how likely they were to recommend their organisation a friend.

Similar splits occur in terms of relationships with other parts of the organisation, with 44 per cent of grumpy developers likely to point to management as the biggest source of friction, compared to 14 per cent of happy devs, while 22 per cent of grumps blamed execs for friction, compared to 8 per cent of happy devs.

There was just one fly in the ointment, in that 14 per cent of happy devs were more likely to point to…other devs as the main source of friction, compared to 8 per cent of grumpy devs.

Overall though, 28 per cent of happy devs said collaboration with colleagues was frictionless, compared to just 5 per cent of grumpy developers.