Tool sprawl could be costing companies $1 million (£794k) in lost productivity each year, with three-quarters of developers losing up to fifteen hours every week by having to rely on multiple tools.

That’s according to platform engineering firm Port’s annual State of Internal Developer Portals  research, which found that engineers are using on average more than seven tools for everyday operational tasks, causing information gaps and diminishing productivity.

Port’s latest study, which surveyed 300 full-time developers working in the US and western Europe, highlights that self-service tools have become a big frustration, with 94% of engineers dissatisfied with their current options, despite introducing them to streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and help developers to solve problems independently.

Only 6% of respondents said they were very satisfied with these tools, as many require in-depth knowledge of their underlying infrastructure or have unintuitive user interfaces.

However, getting help in using any tools at all also seems to be a growing issue. More than three-quarters of engineering teams (78%) reported waiting a day or more for SRE or DevOps assistance, with 16% kept waiting at least a week.

Only 22% of respondents reported that they can typically get issues resolved within a day, a figure that increases to 30% among teams using an internal developer portal. According to Port, this improvement is down to enhanced visibility and self-service capabilities, which help cut down wait times and improve developer efficiency.

Another challenge developers routinely face is the quality of the data they work with. Port found that only 3% of engineers feel the data quality of their metadata repository is completely trustworthy, with 50% having doubts about its accuracy and are unwilling to rely on metadata alone.

The report notes that this trust gap might stem from infrequent updates, as 43% of respondents admitted they update their software asset metadata just once a week, while another 10% said they only do so two-three times a month, all of which potentially leads to more instances of outdated and inaccurate information.

That lack of trust is leading to a rise in popularity for portals to maintain metadata, with 53% of developers stating they use applications like the open source portal Backstage, an internal developer portal, or a combination of both.

Third-party services like Confluence or Jira are also still widely in use (32%), as are commercial service catalogues (26%), however most surprising are the 17% of developers who said they still rely on spreadsheets as a central hub for metadata, despite the manual effort, inefficiencies, and risks of error involved.

Recommended reading

• GenAI Top Spending Priority of CIOs
• “Tool Sprawl” Exacerbating Security Risks
• Comment | Overcoming Vendor Sprawl to Cut Costs and Improve Security

Port claims that this reluctance to transition to more modern alternatives could be due to engineering leaders having invested years into tailoring solutions to fit their needs and building workflows around them, with the idea of disruption to their carefully established ecosystems too much to bear.

“While DevOps best practices have moved software development forward, the principle of “you build it — you run it” has also added significant complexity to engineering teams and the way they function,” states the report.

“By creating a portal that reduces cognitive load for developers — a single consolidated workspace for everything they need — organisations can increase developer productivity and engagement, as well as enhance the quality of their software applications.”