How do organisations measure DevOps progress?

A panel of DevOps professionals including Ford and the Trainline explain how they measure their growth and maturity in their move towards a DevOps culture

Organistions use a mixture of techniques and metrics to measure their DevOps maturity, including daily volume of releases, throughput and developer convenience.

Speaking at Computing's DevOps Live 2019 conference, the panel described a range of diverse, but related strategies.

Sana Essid, platform operations engineer at the Trainline explained that her organisation uses volume of releases per day.

"One of our key indicators in the service management team is amount of releases per day.

"Across each team we look at how many released successfully without rollback, which also gives an indication of quality. Operations have the power to go to certain teams and make them rollback and ensure proper testing before release.

"We also look at the number of new features being delivered per team, so innovation is still at the forefront. Quality-wise, it's about failed releases. We look at how to recover qucikly, and to be the first to spot the issue," Essid assed.

Earlier at the conference, Computing presented the results of its latest research into DevOps trends.

Mario El Antoury, lead sofware engineer at Ford Motor Company said that the key metric at his organisation is throughput.

"For us it's throughput. From the inception of the work to its deployment in production, the shorter that time is, the healthier your process," said El Antoury. "That's a good measure for us, as we're moving from a monolithic to a microservices architecture," he said.

David Blooman, senior platform engineer, at fashion retail app Depop explained that his key metric is essentially developer convenience.

"We look at how quickly a developer can do what he wants to do. One of the examples of successful DevOps is not having to count number of deployments per day.

We have dozens of services, so deploying 200 times per day doesn't matter, it just needs to be efficient and fast. Our goal is for developers to be able to deploy in five minutes. When we achieve that, we can go even faster and make the process even better," he added.

Computing launched Delta, its new market intelligence service for IT professionals at the event.