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Teams everywhere are embracing DevOps to ship better software, faster. But how do you know if your DevOps practices are having an impact?
A thoughtful DevOps assessment helps to understand where your team excels and opportunities for growth.
Whether you're just starting your DevOps journey or looking to level up your practices, measuring your current state is the first step toward meaningful improvement.
Let's explore how to assess your DevOps capabilities, understand what great looks like, and create a practical roadmap for your team's success.
Sections:
DevOps is a cultural and technical movement that emphasizes collaboration, automation, and shared ownership across development and operations teams to improve software delivery speed and reliability.
At its heart, DevOps brings together "Development" and "Operations" in a transformative shift in how teams work together.
DevOps emerged around 2007-8, in response to a then-prevalent challenge – friction between software operations and software development. Borrowing an analogy from John Willis, think of traditional tech companies like restaurants:
Just as a restaurant struggles when the kitchen and waitstaff don't communicate well, software teams face similar challenges when development and operations work in silos.
This Dev versus Ops divide was once the biggest bottleneck in software delivery and DevOps sought to solve it.
A DevOps assessment helps organizations understand their current capabilities and shape their path forward. It maps the evolution from manual, reactive processes to automated, proactive practices that deliver real business value.
This assessment guides teams on where to focus — by understanding where you excel and where growth opportunities lie, teams can make informed decisions about which improvements will create the most meaningful impact.
There are different ways to conduct a DevOps maturity assessment, some examples include:
A thoughtful DevOps assessment can create value for organizations in multiple ways. It can support improving software delivery speed, help with risk management, and improve strategic planning.
An assessment helps a software team’s delivery speed and quality as it typically examines a team’s deployment pipeline in detail, measuring metrics such as deployment frequency, change lead time, and failure rates.
It identifies manual bottlenecks that tend to slow down delivery, such as manual testing, approval processes, and more.
All this to say, the findings from a DevOps assessment can help you target specific improvements which in turn will improve delivery times while balancing code quality.
DevOps assessments help mitigate risk for several reasons – they evaluate security practices in the pipeline, review disaster recovery and business continuity procedures, and identify single points of failure in your architecture and processes.
These assessments support teams in proactively addressing vulnerabilities before they become incidents.
A company’s strategic product and tech roadmap can also be positively impacted by Dev Ops assessments. Not only will technical debt and its impact on future initiatives be reviewed, but the test will look at any optimization areas, such as cost savings. Systems are assessed as to whether they can handle growth, and any outdated tech will be identified.
DORA provides four software delivery metrics used for evaluating the outcomes of the software delivery process.
Based on research spanning over 39,000 professionals across organizations of all sizes and industries, these metrics have proven to be reliable predictors of organizational performance — and are even recommended by industry leaders such as Atlassian.
DORA metrics help teams understand their speed and stability - from how quickly they can ship changes, to how often they deploy, to how well they handle production issues:
The benefit of DORA metrics is that there are benchmarks based on a large data set, enabling organizations to easily assess where they stand:
Once you’ve identified strength and weakness areas, you can then put together an action plan as to how to improve.
We write about our approach to improving DORA metrics here.
To effectively assess and improve your DevOps practices, teams can use Multitudes, an engineering insights platform for productivity and wellbeing.
Multitudes integrates with your existing development tools, such as GitHub, PagerDuty and Jira, to provide insights into your team's productivity and collaboration patterns.
With Multitudes, you can:
By leveraging Multitudes, teams spend less time collecting metrics and more time actioning insights to drive real improvements.
Our clients ship 25% faster while maintaining code quality and team wellbeing.
Ready to improve your DevOps metrics?
