Today Forrester has evaluated GitLab as a Leader in Continuous Integration (CI) in The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2017 report. As the report states, “GitLab delivers ease of use, scalability, integration, and innovation.” We see CI/CD as a critical component of our offering, making it quicker and easier to deliver value through automation. The progress we’ve made in developing a CI/CD solution that’s seamlessly integrated is thanks largely to the participation and feedback of our community and customers.
We’re excited about what the future holds for GitLab CI/CD, so it’s great to know that others see its value. Furthermore Forrester states, “GitLab’s vision is to serve enterprise-scale, integrated software development teams that want to spend more time writing code and less time maintaining their tool chain.”
We’ve said it before (we say it a lot, actually): CI/CD is the cornerstone of modern software development. Delivering what customers want, faster, requires a modernized software development lifecycle that saves time, effort, and cost. Automation is key to this more efficient release cycle, which is why we’ve spent a lot of time developing our built-in test and release automation, so developers can spend less time stringing together their tool chain, and more on innovation and integrating customer feedback. We’re gratified to have been named a leader in CI by Forrester in their report on Continuous Integration Tools for Q3, 2017, which evaluated 10 vendors across 25 different criteria.
We had some key areas of success:
Top score in the Current Offering category
GitLab received the highest score in Forrester’s Current Offering evaluation, which we believe confirms that our product is hard to beat when it comes to ease of installation, configuring builds, platform support, analytics, an intuitive UI, container support and more. This all adds up to a more seamless development process which facilitates DevOps practices and collaboration.
Highest score possible in the Strategy category
Forrester assessed our product strategy, market approach, training, consulting and support, giving us a 5.0, the highest possible score, for all three criteria. This is huge validation for our CI/CD vision, shaped with the help of our customers, community, and their contributions.
Just the beginning
A significant part of that vision, Auto DevOps, just shipped with our 10.0 release. Auto DevOps is a hands-free DevOps experience that automatically configures your build, test, code quality assurance, review apps, deployment, and monitoring in a single environment. Our out-of-the-box templates allow you to set up an end-to-end DevOps lifecycle at the push of a button.
Auto DevOps is just the first step on a journey to building a complete and highly automated DevOps tool chain. Building on strong momentum, we’re working on a number of new features to better leverage our CI/CD tools in a more automated way for both operations as well as development teams. With the full automation we are planning, you will not only be able to deliver a new, functioning application from a developer’s machine to a production environment in minutes, but also monitor all production environments in one dashboard.
Faster time to value
Reducing the time teams spend on manual tasks means you can focus on what matters: building great products that your users want. GitLab CI/CD facilitates a more iterative approach to software development, by automatically testing new code, helping you to catch potential problems earlier in the release cycle, taking the anxiety out of deployments and reducing the cost of fixing bugs. This puts you in a position to release more often, shortening the feedback loop and helping you to release features and improvements that your customers are asking for.
Collaboration without dependency
The fact that GitLab CI/CD is fully integrated makes all the difference. Less context-switching means key information doesn’t slip through the cracks like it can when teams work in different tools, with no single source of truth. Working in an integrated tool fosters collaboration by improving visibility, keeping everyone on the same page and making it easy for different teams to participate and comment. Features like review apps – which automatically spin up a dynamic environment for merge requests, so you can preview changes right away – make it even easier to share improvements with stakeholders and gather feedback.
Being named a Leader in this Wave evaluation, and receiving the Top Score in Current Offering, as well as the highest score possible for Strategy, is validation for us of the strength of today’s GitLab CI offering as well as our vision for the future.
