Many consider DevOps adoption to be a finite process. It starts with developing some build scripts, some automated test cases and some deployment scripts all put together in a pipeline in your favourite CICD engine. Fair enough, it is automated, it is one click and it releases on demand, job done!
But is there something more your organisation can learn from this simple process? The process may be simple, but remember that the development teams across your organisation are repeating this process several times a day. DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google, studied this process extensively and published 4 metrics that are today de-facto standards for measuring the state of DevOps.
Lead time
Lead time measures how long it takes to go from code committed to code running successfully in production?
Deployment frequency
Deployment frequency measures how often your organisation is able to release to end users?
Time to restore
Time to restore measures how long it takes for your application to recover from an unplanned outage/incident?
Failure rate
Failure rate measures the percentage of releases which lead to service degradation to end users, which requires a hot patch to bring the service back to normalcy.
What do these metrics reveal?
In the state of DevOps report 2021, these metrics are used to categorise the organisation into 4 groups.
What can you do now?
Why not head to the DORA DevOps quick check page and find out for yourself? Obviously, you are going to make guesses when you answer the quick check.
There is a better way!
These metrics can be easily measured and continuously tracked from the various CICD tools used in the organisation. If you are hosting your projects in GitLab or GitHub, the open-source FourKeys project can help to automatically measure your team's software delivery performance.
But there is an even better way!
Reach out to me, [email protected] and let's have a conversation about the state of DevOps in your org, and much more.
