DevOps has emerged in recent years as a crucial element of software development. Software delivery became significantly quicker and more flexible as a result. However, gauging the performance of DevOps is sometimes tricky. There are several causes, but “various conceptions of DevOps” are the main culprit. Software engineering using a DevOps methodology emphasizes teamwork, communication, and consistency. These three Cs guarantee quick, secure, and effective software development lifecycles.
Different individuals within a business may see DevOps differently. Others claim it’s all about automation and tooling, while others think it merges Dev and Ops. A clear understanding of DevOps success has grown elusive due to the multitude of viewpoints that cloud the discipline.
Despite this problem, you can use five important DevOps indicators to gauge how well the software delivery process is doing. Velocity, Quality, Stability, and Release Readiness are the five most important metrics.
Measuring Deployment Frequency
The easiest of the bunch to monitor is deployment frequency. Every time a deployment occurs, a straightforward counter is incremented. Technically, this could be retrieved through your pipeline provider’s API or monitored via a specific step at the pipeline’s conclusion. Values ought to be associated with the team member and the project. You may track this number to provide a “deploys per day” measure. When things pick up, you may go further by looking at “deploys per day per developer.” Also, you may consider AWS devops uniquely for your AWS cloud.
Consider tracking an associated metric as well. Batch size and velocity are highly correlated, and it is simpler to implement, test, and deliver smaller batches. This makes sense. Rather than a 1,000-line PR, submit a 10,000-line PR for code review. You can tell which one will be examined and merged first. The overall difference in each PR might be used to calculate this statistic.
Frequency and Size of Deployment and Server Availability
Customers must receive value immediately from DevOps teams. How frequently teams can deploy software is a crucial question to explore. Teams should concentrate on getting technology out but must also remember that speed is crucial. A common deployment period is one week, even if organizational and deployment goals vary.
Another crucial DevOps indication is monitoring the quantity of deployed stories, feature requests, and issue fixes. Depending on their size, individual work items might have different counts. So, you might have to monitor the number of story points and development work days used.
For your company, application downtime might be a nightmare. Your server must be accessible around-the-clock to serve users continuously. A dependability statistic called server availability determines how long your server has been operational. In other words, it keeps tabs on an application’s uptime or downtime throughout a certain time frame.
Deployment Stability
The percentage of time the most recent build for a certain repository was successful is known as deployment stability. On the scale, red corresponds to 0% to 50%, yellow to 90%, and green to 100%. A developer created this measure in response to developer complaints that they were spending too much time correcting builds.
When superior test automation has prevented a subpar change from being released to production, broken builds can be positive. Broken builds aren’t always the result of faulty code; occasionally, an infrastructure issue must be resolved. When broken builds continue for a long period and start to hinder developer productivity, they constitute an issue.
It is clear where squads need to spend effort clearing up technical debt and improving the deployment process by showing broken builds over time on the dashboard.
Quality and Customer Feedback
To various individuals, quality means different things. While some teams strongly emphasize following style guidelines, others may be more concerned with minimizing security risks or preserving a positive user experience. Everyone on the team must understand what quality means to them.
To gauge the code quality, you may combine a variety of metrics. A specified quality standard should result in the CI pipeline failing for anything that does not satisfy it.
Several helpful signs are:
- The number of vulnerabilities
- Violation of style guidelines
- Code coverage
- The number of stale branches
- Cyclomatic complexity
- Broken architectural constraints. For instance, ensuring no code in one module refers to classes in another.
Customer feedback can take many forms, including information from Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, use trends, social media comments, and tickets opened. The specifics differ based on the industry and the product, but we must have the customer’s voice represented in some tangible way since they are the ones who foot the tab at the end of the day.
Change Volume and Failure Rate
The change failure rate is a helpful DevSecOps statistic that shortens the total lead time and accelerates software delivery. In other words, it shows how well your deployment process works.
It calculates the proportion of hotfixes and code modifications that occur after production. It also shows the proportion of unsuccessful production deployments.
A high failure rate can indicate that your team is ineffective or that your deployment methodology and business objectives are unclear. As a result, you can suffer losses in terms of money and clients.
To deliver a smooth user experience with minimal application disturbance, change volume is a crucial DevSecOps KPI. It calculates the typical quantity of new features or code released during a specific period and represents development velocity or the overall volume of work completed during a sprint. A successful development process is characterized by a high change volume and a low failure rate.
Conclusion
Making every tile on the dashboard turn green shouldn’t be your aim. You want to know where your team is excelling and where there is potential for development. After that, you’ll be able to choose where to spend your time confidently.
People can easily visualize these five things to consider, and they can help several organizations improve. But when you investigate how these indicators may benefit your firm, start small and introduce them gradually.
