Why Improving Development Velocity is Key to Future-Proofing Your Organization

Development velocity is more important than ever. The pace of development directly influences your organization’s ability to innovate and compete. And slow development cycles can leave your business trailing behind the competition. 

5 Reasons Improving Development Velocity Should Be a Main Focus

Improving development velocity should remain a strategic focus at your organization for a number of reasons. Let’s break them down:

1. Accelerate Digital Transformation

Accelerating development velocity means you can accelerate digital transformation efforts. By delivering new products, services, and features faster, your business can respond more quickly to market changes and evolving customer expectations.

2. Stay Ahead of Technological Advancements

You can’t ignore the growing reliance on real-time data and AI-driven solutions. This demands frequent updates, continuous integration, and rapid iteration. Faster development velocity helps you stay ahead of technological advancements; for example, by quickly implementing new features. 

3. Secure Against Evolving Threats

Evolving cybersecurity threats require strict security measures. And fast-paced development cycles can facilitate faster incorporation of security measures into DevOps pipelines. This ensures that software remains secure and compliant while minimizing vulnerabilities.

4. Enable CI/CD

The pressure is on to enable continuous delivery and DevOps practices. To do so requires that software is delivered in smaller, more frequent updates. Increasing development velocity is essential to implement continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

5. Stay Ahead of Competitive Challenges

Economic uncertainty, increased competition, and globalization further amplify the need for speed in development. Your business must rapidly prototype, test, and scale innovative solutions. Faster development allows businesses like yours to capitalize on new opportunities and respond to challenges before competitors can react.

What Exactly is Development Velocity?

Development velocity refers to the speed at which a development team can deliver software. In physics, velocity is a straightforward concept defined by the formula: Velocity = Distance/Time

In software development, development velocity becomes a measure of how much work is completed within a specific time frame. The more work completed in a shorter time, the higher the development velocity.

Think of development velocity as driving a car. Instead of using modern conveniences like cruise control or a GPS, you are driving manually and constantly need to adjust the speed and direction without any assistance. This scenario mirrors a development process without continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. 

Similar to this, we have other obstacles that reduce our velocity in the real world as well as in the software development lifecycle world. 

Take traffic congestion, construction zones, narrow lanes, and merging lanes. These can represent data silos across single or multicloud applications, complex data transformations, data quality, and data integration issues respectively. 

Development Velocity Obstacles

However, increasing development velocity is not without challenges. You may encounter obstacles.

• Legacy systems, with outdated technologies, create bottlenecks that slow down development cycles. Migrating to more modern, agile systems is crucial enhancing velocity.
• Poor cross-functional collaboration between development, operational, and business teams.
• Poor quality assurance in lieu of faster delivery. This primarily happens due to data quality or working with subsets of data which doesn’t cover all the aspects of QA.
• Slow adaptation to security regulations, due to legacy security measures. This often causes confusion and friction when delivering data to development environments.

Striving for faster velocity involves balancing the need for speed with the need for quality. In other words, the “distance” covered by the team results in real value for the business and its customers. 

Remember: evelopment velocity isn't the only metric that matters. If you're measuring DevOps success, consider DORA metrics. 

Eliminate DevOps Delays

Hear from my colleagues — Aaron Jensen, Vikram Kulkarni, and Matthew Yeh — on how to eliminate DevOps delays so that you can accelerate your development velocity. Watch the session now!

How Development Velocity Affects Your Bottom Line

Businesses today are under intense pressure to innovate constantly. It doesn’t matter whether you're rolling out new features for mobile apps or integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Essentially, the quickness of your software delivery can carve out your competitive advantage. Suffice it to say, development velocity very clearly impacts your bottom line. 

For example, the healthcare sector must embrace solutions quickly to manage patient data more securely. Financial institutions race to provide new mobile banking features that offer a better user experience. In e-commerce, companies must quickly iterate on features that improve overall customer satisfaction and drive revenue. 

Let’s dig further into how development velocity may impact your organization — and why data might just be the secret key to accelerating velocity. 

Pressure to Innovate

Technology is evolving rapidly. Consumer demands are higher than ever, and they won’t be easing up anytime soon. The ability to quickly adapt, respond to market changes, and deliver new features or products can make the difference between leading the market or falling behind.

Organizations are even willing to make sacrifices. For example, according to our Perforce Delphix 2025 State of Data Compliance and Security Report, 61% of surveyed organizations don’t protect sensitive data in non-production because they fear it would slow down innovation. 

Since data is at the core of innovation, test data also has to move at the same pace as code development. When an application running in production fails due to inadequate test data, the cost to the business is significant. In a recent IDC study — IDC: The Business Value of Delphix — it was estimated that an application outage costs a business about $4.2 million per day. For certain mission-critical applications, that amount can be much higher. 

Despite the critical role of test data, adopting test data automation isn’t as common as in other areas of software development modernization. We can calculate the loss to business when inadequate test data causes bigger outages in production. But a loss to innovation is something that will impact your business much more than that in the long term. 

Need for Efficiency

Speed is important, but it's essentially useless if your workflow is riddled with inefficiencies, redundant steps, and bottlenecks. Faster development velocity means that a team can deliver more with fewer resources. 

Additionally, accelerating developer velocity reduces time-to-market for new products or iterations. This is directly tied to competitive positioning and revenue generation, so improving efficiency is key to faster time-to-market. 

Common reasons for inefficiency include:

• Legacy test data management.
• Manual workflows.
• Fragmented data ecosystems.

By using a legacy approach to test data management, software development teams must work with insufficient and stale data sets. This limits their ability to achieve continuous testing and quality with sufficient velocity.

Evolving Security Regulations

Data compliance and security regulations are constantly changing, and your business must adapt to ensure the safety and protection of data. 

In the 2025 State of Data Compliance and Security Report, we found that 100% of surveyed organizations have data in non-production subject to privacy regulations, and 54% were concerned about the impact of data compliance on testing, release cycle, and development speed. 

Getting the balance right between meeting compliance requirements and speeding up development is tricky. It requires the right toolset to help you protect sensitive data while still enabling your development and testing teams. 

Key Development Velocity Metrics

So, what should you pay attention to when it comes to measuring development velocity’s impact on your business’s bottom line? 

Here at Perforce Delphix, we discuss development velocity at length with our customers. The Delphix DevOps Data Platform, providing data delivery and masking, helps our customers move faster. And that means they can achieve key development velocity metrics.

In IDC: The Business Value of Delphix, 10 Delphix customers were interviewed on how using Delphix helps them. Their responses, validated by IDC analysts, highlight how achieving improvements in metrics, like productivity, translates to faster business value delivery. How? Enabling developers with self-service access to copies of test data helps them test more frequently. They’re no longer stuck waiting for data.

Here are the top two metrics that I recommend, based on my experience working with Delphix customers. 

Release Frequency

Release frequency reflects how often your organization can ship new features, fixes, or updates. More frequent releases require faster release cycles. By automating software deployment and increasing release frequency, you can help your business go-to-market faster. 

In IDC: The Business Value of Delphix, one customer in e-commerce and telecom cited that because Delphix enables fast provisioning of fresh production data, they can achieve faster development cycles. They said, “Our developers can be more productive by not waiting for manual data provisioning, resulting in an improved go-to-market time.” 

Another customer in health insurance echoed that comment, saying “I feel like because we can deploy faster, we make the test engineering team faster, which means we can deliver faster.” 

Developer Hours

Developer hours indicate how efficiently your teams are able to work. Improving on this metric means reducing time wasted on repetitive tasks, like waiting for test data, and allowing developers to focus on high-impact work.

In the IDC: The Business Value of Delphix, the IDC analysts validated that there was an average 25.2% increase in efficiency for software development and testing teams. This increase in efficiency reduced the time needed to develop a new application by 58%. And the number of applications released annually grew by 28%!

How? Delphix customers get on-demand and fast access to test data, enabling them to become so much more efficient. 

Other Development Velocity Metrics

Of course, release frequency and developer hours aren’t the only metrics that matter.

Additional development velocity metrics include: 

• Lead Time for Changes: The time it takes from making a code change to deploying that change in production.
• Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that result in errors, rollbacks, or issues post-deployment.
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): The time taken to resolve any disruptions or failures in production.

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IDC: The Business Value of Delphix

Analyst study of customers shows that the Delphix DevOps Data Platform delivers a 408% three-year ROI. Discover the tangible benefits of Delphix, validated by IDC analysts.

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The Role of Leadership in Accelerating Developer Velocity

As an executive leader, you have the power to shape the overall organizational culture, strategy, and resource allocation that directly impacts how quickly developers can deliver value. If you’re in a leadership role, the decisions you make enable development teams to work faster.

So here’s how you can make an impact to accelerate developer velocity:

Create a Developer-Centric Culture

There needs to be a developer-centric culture across the organization. Recognizing that developers are indispensable to business success is fundamental to fostering this culture. Treat developers as the vital assets they are. Give them the freedom to innovate, the resources they need, and the right processes to do it. This approach stimulates productivity and bolsters morale.

Align Business and Development Goals

Ensure that business goals and development goals are aligned. That way, developers can focus on what matters most. Provide clear product roadmaps and prioritize features based on company strategy.

Invest in Modern Infrastructure and Tools

To speed up developer velocity, you’ll need to invest in modern infrastructure and tools. Developers need reliable, scalable systems that allow them to code, test, and deploy quickly, complete with easy-to-use capabilities. 

Organizations should have a modern DevOps pipeline, CI/CD automation, and developer tools that straighten out the process and eliminate any holdups. Time is a valuable asset for every developer, and it should not be spent on dull tasks like waiting for data to be available or prepping data for basic testing.

Encourage Cross-Functional Collaboration and Alignment

Introduce tools that promote seamless collaboration and alignment within and across teams. By breaking down the barriers of silos and fostering a culture of collaboration, you can ensure that developers are engaging with the right stakeholders. This collaborative approach empowers developers to make informed decisions and quickly adapt product features.

Provide Compliant Data in Development Environments

Make compliance-focused tools available in your organization. One example is a tool such as Delphix to provide compliant data in development environments, so developers can innovate, test, and experiment without worrying about the security of data.

Reduce Technical Debt

Over time, organizations tend to accumulate technical debt without the right tools in place, usually through quick fixes, outdated systems, and inconsistent processes. This can severely hinder developer velocity and prevent them from shipping quality code quickly. You should make strategic decisions above investing in long-term technical improvements to reduce technical debt.

Gain Faster Time-to-Market With Delphix

Why Delphix?

With the Delphix DevOps Data platform, you can automate compliant test data for DevOps. Using Delphix directly impacts enterprise development velocity, helping businesses like yours accelerate innovation. 

With Delphix’s data virtualization and delivery capabilities, you can decrease data footprints by 10x and accelerate delivery by 100x. 

Here’s how Delphix can help with:

• Faster development and testing: Provision and refresh test data instantly, eliminating delays associated with manual data setup or waiting for access to live data.
• Data compliance and security: Use data masking to ensure that sensitive information is protected while developers and testers have access to realistic anonymized data for testing purposes.
• Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD): Automate the provisioning of compliant, high-quality test data while reducing development bottlenecks and improving speed.
• Cloud-agnostic capabilities: Deploy Delphix on-premises or in any of the major cloud providers. Plus, Delphix replication provides powerful capabilities to move data across on-premises or clouds seamlessly.
• Cost efficiency: Optimize storage and resources by providing virtualized data environments, reducing the need for physical copies and improving infrastructure efficiency.

By automating test data management, Delphix accelerates DevOps workflows, helping teams move faster without sacrificing compliance and quality.

But don’t just take our word for it. 

Examples of Delphix Accelerating Development Velocity

Get examples of how real-life companies use Delphix to accelerate development velocity.

Express Scripts Accelerates Delivery by 3x

Express Scripts used Delphix to virtualize data across 42 environments. Their mainframe teams were then able to deliver in two weeks instead of six weeks. And to top it off, using Delphix helped them save $1.6 million in cost avoidance. Watch Express Scripts’ story >>

Natura and Co Cuts Release Times in Half

By using Delphix, Natura and Co reduced the time it took to provision and refresh data from 48 hours to one hour. They were able to switch from monthly to biweekly releases, and they reduced storage by 90%. Read Natura and Co’s story >>

Trifecta Clinical Spends 25% More Time on New Features

Spinning up environments used to take up to a day for Trifecta Clinical, and provisioning data for development and testing teams was slow. With Delphix, they can now provision test data in minutes instead of hours, with a 20% increase in early bug detection. As a result, they can spend 25% more time on projects to develop new features, rather than fix bugs.

“Delphix has helped significantly accelerate time from ideation to implementation by creating a host of efficiencies across our Dev and QA teams." – Dave Young, CEO, Trifecta Clinical

Read Trifecta Clinical’s story >>

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