Measuring DevOps: Are You Moving Fast Enough?

Nearly everyone agrees that speed is essential for DevOps success. Because even if you’re tracking the right application performance, customer experience, and business metrics to measure the progress of your app, if it takes you a year to deliver it, chances are someone else will swoop in and steal your thunder.

But how do you know that you’re moving fast enough? And how do you balance speed with software quality?

The answers to those questions and more are found in our latest eBook, “DevOps Without Measurement Is a Fail,” which introduces what we believe are the five critical drivers of DevOps success and explains how and what to measure to achieve that success. To measure speed, for example, DevOps teams need to keep tabs on the speed of development, delivery, and response to issues that occur in production.

Typical metrics used to track progress and success in the speed arena include:

• Lead time for changes
• Frequency of code releases
• Mean time to resolution

Many organizations rely on cloud computing to streamline and accelerate the development and deployment of software. Through Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), DevOps teams can gain access to the services they need to bring new products to market quickly, without the effort to provision and manage servers, networks, or storage. From a cultural perspective, ChatOps — using centralized, time-stamped communication logs, real-time interactions with DevOps tools, and assistance from “chatbots” — also helps DevOps teams improve speed and efficiency.

As with other drivers of DevOps success, you can’t focus on speed in exclusion of your other goals, particularly software quality, as it relates to the customer experience and application performance. In fact, development and deployment speed can become a negative if the deployment quality is poor, resulting in more time and effort needed to fix quality issues that appear in production.

To learn more about which metrics we believe you should be tracking to determine whether your DevOps efforts are paying off, be sure to download the “DevOps Without Measurement Is a Fail” ebook.