Building DevOps processes takes time — here’s how to tell if you’re on the right track
As a Chief Technology Officer, creating a culture of innovation and building a resilient DevOps infrastructure should be among your top priorities. But that doesn’t happen overnight; it’s an ongoing journey that requires strategy, testing, implementation, and an honest assessment of what’s working and what’s not. In order to stay on the right path, it’s important to adopt a framework that walks your team through the process.
This framework, also known as a DevOps Maturity Model, helps engineers and CTOs assess where they are in the DevOps adoption pipeline and assess their current initiatives. Using a DevOps Maturity Model helps developers and engineers improve performance and reach their goals. Before that can happen, however, it’s critical for leadership teams to understand the building blocks of DevOps maturity and how the framework acts as a roadmap for success.
Understanding the DevOps Maturity Model
When it comes to DevOps maturity, there are several different schools of thought that all lead to similar conclusions. In some cases, depending on the source, the DevOps Maturity Model might be referred to as the DevOps Maturity Assessment Framework, DevOps Maturity Matrix, or DevOps Capability Maturity Model. Despite the minor differences in verbiage, these models generally focus on several core values that can be summarized as culture, technology, structure, and collaboration.
Culture
To successfully implement DevOps initiatives, companies need to make an organizational shift towards a culture of DevOps. This means fostering an environment that prioritizes continuous learning and improvement while helping different teams apply their expertise at different points in the pipeline.
Technology
Automation and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) are cornerstones of DevOps culture. By embracing this technology, developers and engineers can stay agile, more carefully monitor software development, and ultimately produce a top-tier solution. In order for a DevOps Maturity Model to work, teams should aim to automate as many repetitive tasks as possible and build an efficient, scalable development pipeline.
Structure
Do your DevOps initiatives account for every stage of the software development lifecycle? Are they aligned with corporate policies and business goals? Are you able to test and deploy new builds quickly? Your structure and processes must be clearly defined from the start; otherwise, you run the risk of slowing down production and running into roadblocks during critical stages.
Collaboration
Because DevOps requires different teams to work together, smooth collaboration is a must. Developers and engineers should be well aware of their shared goals and work towards them together, rather than only focusing on their individual departments.
How to Measure DevOps Maturity and Boost Performance
Step 1: Know the 5 Stages of the DevOps Maturity Model
Successfully creating a culture of DevOps and achieving development goals starts with understanding the five stages of the DevOps Maturity Model. While different CTOs and IT experts might describe the stages in different terms, they essentially boil down to these core concepts:
- Initiation: At the initial stage of DevOps maturity, you’re just introducing your organization to DevOps concepts, bringing together the development and operations teams.
- Repeatable/Adoption: At stage two, you should be seeing the foundation of a strong DevOps culture. Developers and engineers should understand the core principles of DevOps and begin applying them proactively.
- Defined/Integration: As your DevOps culture strengthens, it’s time to ensure that your processes are standardized and easily repeatable. This is typically the time to implement automation wherever possible.
- Measured/Transformation: The fourth stage is defined by effective management and continuous improvement. By now, your teams should have a comprehensive understanding of the role automation plays in DevOps and know how to share their knowledge while organically incorporating feedback into the next iteration of software.
- Optimized/Innovation: After working through the four previous stages, your DevOps processes should be fully automated and streamlined. Teams should know how to handle any issues that arise without missing a beat, and your organization is free to keep innovating and iterating at a speedy pace.
Step 2: Conduct a DevOps Maturity Assessment
Which of the five DevOps maturity stages does your organization fall into? You can answer that question using the key metrics established by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program’s Accelerate State of DevOps 2023 report:
- Change lead time: This measures how long it takes changes to deploy. The shorter the change lead time, the more productive your team will be.
- Deployment frequency: How frequently are these changes being pushed? Alongside change lead time, deployment frequency reflects your team’s agility and shows how quickly they can pivot.
- Change failure rate: Over time, changes that result in critical failures should become less frequent as your software becomes more stable.
- Failed deployment recovery time: Those change failures can provide valuable data, including how long it takes teams to recover. Be sure to monitor the period of time after such a failure to ensure that recovery processes are improving and your organization’s DevOps culture is becoming more resilient.
Step 3: Identify Areas for Improvement
If your organization is still in the early stages of the DevOps Maturity Model and your key metrics indicate slow or stalled progress, it’s time to take a closer look at what’s not working. It could be technical debt, skill gaps, scaling bottlenecks, security concerns, or a combination thereof, but defining these areas for improvement is the first step toward actually improving.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for resolving these issues; your next steps will be defined by your DevOps teams, the software itself, how well you’ve implemented automation, and a number of other factors specific to your organization. Once you’ve identified the problem areas, work with your developers and engineers to implement fixes and ensure the problems don’t repeat in the future.
Step 4: Measure the Impact
As you move through the five stages of DevOps maturity, continue to reassess the key performance indicators mentioned in step two. By the later stages, your change lead time should be significantly reduced, and failures should be not just rare, but easily fixed. If you’re not seeing improvement in these areas, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and look for more effective solutions to your biggest challenges.
Step 5: Find the Right DevOps Partner
You don’t have to find these solutions on your own, however. By adopting a no-code/low-code automation platform, you can more easily make your way through the stages of the DevOps Maturity Model and speed up your time to market. For example, DuploCloud works with DevOps teams by automatically turning high-level application architecture specifications into low-level cloud infrastructure services, reducing cloud operating costs by 75% and reducing human errors. This results in streamlined operations that still meet regulatory guidelines and security standards.
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