If there was a way to enable your digital organization to create business value faster and increase revenue, would you do it? Most business leaders wouldn’t hesitate to answer a resounding “yes!” The last decade has given rise to just such a process, DevOps, allowing software businesses to iterate at a rapid pace and deliver business value faster than ever before. However, organizations need a way to measure that value and to show whether their initiative to adopt DevOps has been successful.
What Is DevOps And Why Is It Important?
Defining what DevOps is involves exploring areas relating to organizational culture, engineering, and tools. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides an excellent, succinct explanation on its site:
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.
DevOps should enable a continuous, looping “flow” of feedback between development and operations teams:
Figure 1: Continuous flow from dev to ops. Source: Coder Society
Past development models often resulted in a logical wall between development and operations teams, which passed work back and forth over the wall but with little context or knowledge transfer. As software projects grew in complexity, and market demand required faster iteration, these models did not scale.
DevOps methodologies and patterns revolutionized software engineering at-scale, bridging operations and development and converting Byzantine, manual processes into streamlined automation.
Put simply, DevOps allows end-to-end software engineering to happen faster. Features get to customers quicker, more business value is generated, and ultimately, revenue grows.
To know if you are successfully implementing DevOps you can measure KPIs, which we explain in the next chapter.
Identify and Collect KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) represent a kind of measurement or metric that indicates whether a team or initiative is successful. KPIs generally need to align with a specific goal, be measurable, and fit within a time-box. In the case of DevOps, KPIs should provide quantifiable data relating to objectives like deployment velocity and performance.
Here, we’ll discuss five of the most critical KPIs, and move on to explore how they can be integrated with reporting and visualizations.
1. Deployment Frequency
If you have to choose only one KPI to collect for DevOps, it should be deployment frequency.
If the primary goal of DevOps is to increase development and deployment velocity, then the primary metric of success is how frequently deployments take place. As teams begin to adopt DevOps, frequency should increase. Any drop is indicative of a bottleneck or choke-point somewhere in the process.
A simple way to measure frequency could be to configure a basic webhook on the final stage of your CI/CD pipeline or deployment tool. Any successful deploy should trigger the webhook, incrementing the number of deployments.
With highly complex deployment environments, it might be necessary to make the metric more granular. For example, by region or by customer.
2. Change Lead Time
In a successful DevOps culture, the fast feedback flow between operations and development should enable any changes to happen quickly, correctly, and efficiently.
New features, patches, bug fixes, and security remediations should all be able to proceed from creation to delivery with minimal lead time. Longer lead times are again indicative of a bottleneck.
To effectively measure change lead time, you’ll need to successfully implement at least two other methodologies from DevOps and Agile:
- A unified work backlog for dev and ops, which provides a single source of truth on the status of all work items for a particular application or service.
- Single-ticket/feature deploys to make sure that deployments are isolated so that they can be rolled back if needed.
Once these are implemented, any change is tied directly to a uniquely identified ticket or work item. The deployment system (such as a CI/CD pipeline) reads the ticket identifier, and using webhooks, it can automatically close any work item that it successfully deploys.
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