The new Forrester Wave™: Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2017 for application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals is now live!

Forrester survey data indicates most developers (67% of 2,000 developers surveyed) use CI tools as part of their software development process, but only 17% use them daily. Does your team fall within this 17%? Or, do you use these tools daily but are looking for a solution that will integrate more fluidly with DevOps tools to create an automated delivery code pipeline (CI/CD)?

This Wave evaluation is the best starting point for you if you want to benchmark your CI solution against the alternatives. Forrester’s evaluation uncovered a CI tools market in which four vendor solutions — GitLab, Microsoft, CircleCI, and CloudBees — emerged as Leaders, although their strengths differ. Another four providers — Codeship, AWS, Travis CI, and JetBrains — are Strong Performers. Atlassian and IBM are Contenders.

We evaluated these vendors against 25 criteria that roll up into three high-level buckets: current offering, strategy, and market presence. The criteria and their weightings are based on past research and user inquiries. The evaluation process was specifically designed to uncover which CI solutions have a current offering, vision and roadmap for the future that best empowers AD&D teams to automate software delivery tasks and easily integrate with other parts of the tool chain, without unwanted complication and management overhead. Customer feedback regarding the ease of integration was especially important.

Your criteria for such a solution may differ depending on your needs, hence I recommend you go beyond the Forrester Wave graphic and:

  • Download the Excel sheet associated with the graphic (Figure 2 in the report).
  • View the detailed evaluations in the scoring guide.
  • Adapt the criteria weightings to fit your data resiliency solutions needs and see your (potential) solution’s custom ranking.

Please let me know if you are willing to share your experiences with selecting and implementing these solutions.  And, if you need Forrester’s help in selecting a solution — for example, through inquiry, advisory, or project consulting work — just reach out.