Open source tools power Europe’s economy

On October 8, 2021, GitLab celebrates its tenth anniversary as an open source project. Ten years of enabling diverse teams to collaborate on software development and project management through a complete DevOps platform delivered as a single application.

This anniversary not only represents another milestone in the success story of open source software. It also highlights the many practical benefits for European companies, startups and academic institutions: The use of cloud-native collaboration platforms enables faster and more efficient software development cycles. Open source software and hardware already support the technological independence, competitiveness and innovation of the EU economy, according to research by the European Commission and Open Forum Europe.

GitLab believes that open source platforms improve team collaboration and software code quality because they work very well with decentralized collaborators, partner organizations and developer communities, and in complex multi-cloud environments. Before the cloud era, team collaboration and creativity were often limited because team members were confined to a single organization or technology stack in terms of software development.

DevOps tools also provide greater control when it comes to software development, such as standardized scheduling workflows, source control, software checks, and security audits – GitLab itself provides users with a single data store and user interface, as well as a single permission set for teams. This flexibility and control simplifies collaboration on projects, such as in-house developers designing a stock and securities investment application or a global team of scientists creating a 3D-printable microscope for medical field research in developing countries.

A survey of developers and security professionals conducted by GitLab shows the advances in code release, testing and security that DevOps tools are making: A significant majority (60%) of developers are releasing code twice as fast as before – that’s 25% more than before the 2020 pandemic. DevOps teams are performing more security scans than ever before: more than half are performing SAST scans, 44% are performing DAST scans, and about 50% are scanning containers and dependencies. A large majority (70%) of security team members say security has shifted to the left. Looking ahead, three-quarters of DevOps teams are using or plan to use either machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) or bots for testing/code reviews – up a remarkable 41% from 2020.

As more companies look to integrate ML/AI into their technology structures, GitLab’s acquisition of UnReview earlier this year has already integrated ML/AI tools to automatically identify appropriate code reviewers and control scanning workloads. GitLab also offers fuzz testing, which uses random input to identify “bugs” in code that would not be noticed using traditional software testing methods such as SAST, DAST or IAST.

Company history – it’s always been about efficient collaboration.

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