DevOps Assessment—A Seamless Way to Measure Your DevOps Maturity

It is critical for a company to undergo a DevOps assessment when it wants to implement the DevOps philosophy. It must measure its IT, people, tools, and processes, then create a path based on this snapshot and plan the DevOps journey. Aligning an entire company and managing massive transformations requires vision of the target. There are times when the vision takes a top-down approach, which is not the agile approach the industry is used to, but it is required to align the middle management to model the program. Change management always proves to be the most difficult aspect of transformations, as you must gather people and motivate them around the same idea or goal. Generating the planning trajectory doesn’t override your ability to adapt or adjust the plan. It’s intended for direction and thus ensures that everyone is on board.

DevOps Assessment: The Bottom-Up Approach

It is good to have a bottom-up approach when evaluating DevOps maturity. Teams can auto assess themselves and apply improvement strategies, taking into account the company’s goals. This ascertains everyone’s prepared to facilitate a smooth work flow. Once the planning trajectory is generated, everyone is involved from the word go. The intent here is to present you with a DevOps assessment matrix, which can be a useful evaluation tool for your DevOps checks and balances. The DevOps assessment presented here is a unique model generated from several iterations with industry players and teams.

Your Pillars of DevOps Assessment

• DevOps Culture: A common culture is created between dev & ops—build and use.
• Automation: This limits errors and creates stability and reliability throughout the process.
• Measure: This pillar demands that you define, collect, mix, and analyze technical, business, and product metrics.
• Sharing: Create collaboration between teams and therefore meet common goals.

For every pillar, the focus is on the key operational axis for which DevOps assessment is approached.

Culture

Culture is likely the main ingredient of the DevOps philosophy, and in assessing your teams, the following questions are paramount and must be asked:

• Are extensive teams united?
• Is the DevOps value system a part of my team?
• Is the team transparent and ready to accept failure?
• Does the team put the customer at the center? Do the decisions made value the customer?
• Are procedures and processes improved regularly and is waste removed?
• Does the organization suffer from being siloed?
• Are processes mastered?
• Does the team regard technical excellence?
• Is there a left-shifting of tests and security in the life cycle?

Automation

Automation is the most known pillar of DevOps. Even if people don’t regard it to the level of the culture, it’s still a key accelerator that combines:

• Configuration management
• Testing
• Deployments
• Releases
• Integration
• Continuous delivery

Some of the best practices that an organization has to focus on with automation mind includes:

• Repetitive and low value-added task automation.
• Test automation—unit, functional, integration, security, etc.
• Continuous integration.
• Deploying continuously.
• Cloud and application architecture.
• Managing incidents.
• Reliable service.
• Scalable projections.
• Cycle time reduction for fast delivery.

Sharing

As one of the key pillars in DevOps, obviously between dev teams, op teams, dev-ops teams, sharing combines, among others:

• Common goals
• Project management
• Processes
• Goals/objectives
• Co-building

Sharing is a crucial component for teams’ collaboration. Critical areas are:

• Managing knowledge.
• Possessing common tools.
• Using common rituals and processes.
• Co-building and having shared responsibilities.
• Sharing goals.

Measure

In any system, you encounter critical indicators of business progress, and the only thing you can do with such is to measure them for analysis and decision making. As a pillar in DevOps assessment, it encompasses:

• Common metrics
• Technical metrics
• Business metrics
• Project metrics
• Product metrics

Measuring metrics will help to evaluate critical indicators and measure the impact of changes. The focus points are:

• Standard metrics between team members.
• Technical debt and quality of code.
• Business and product metrics.
• How to collect, store, and display data.
• Analyzing data.

As already evident, there are countless axes that you can focus on in assessing your DevOps journey. For any path you choose, it’s advisable to formalize your goals in every field by creating at least 3 levels of maturity. It’s only by taking this approach that you will drive transformation in the organization and have other teams evaluate themselves too. Ones you have your maturity of all teams, you can collect the information in radar graphs that gives you a picture of the DevOps maturity. Such graph would look like the ones below:

Your DevOps Assessment Accountability

In DevOps assessment, adapting more responsibility for building and maintaining the services that are created and offered is paramount. You need to account for the uptime and reliability of those same services. Your DevOps accountability also charges you to take on-call responsibilities in case of an application or infrastructural emergencies. Taking responsibilities for those services, and possessing the power to correct issues when the need arises, software developers need to take on-call responsibilities, and create better codes, and display more reliable services, with further accountability. In applying better accountability, your teams take the correct step to view product development questions and answers, and testing more seriously, which leads to better processing and business decisions. Proper accountability also curates your stakeholders’ trust, which every business or organization needs to stay successful and relevant in their space. If you cannot give a reliable account with all checks and balances leveling off, your teams will be in chaos, and you will not experience the optimum result of your investment. You will feel that DevOps has failed you, but you would have failed yourself, so be knowledgeable as you take the step to mature your company. With the DevOps brand being the holistic entity that it is, to adapt the DevOps culture, businesses must learn to adjust their language, which encompasses every aspect necessary to bring success, using the brand. Now that your DevOps assessment has given you an overview of maturity checkpoints, you can plan the actions you need to upgrade your teams and attain your goals to pilot your overall transformation. If you need a thorough, unbiased DevOps assessment, please use our tool available here to find out what stage you are.