A DevOps maturity assessment is the most important tool for your DevOps iterative advancements.
DevOps and IT teams often struggle with where to start or what comes next. A clear DevOps maturity assessment gives you an actionable roadmap. It shows your current maturity state, security, and tech stack, and maps out actionable steps forward.
In this context, your organization's “maturity” reflects how well you integrate DevOps culture, automation, governance, and tools. The more mature your DevOps and IT Service Management (ITSM) operations become, the more resilient and secure your tech stack will be.
All of this makes it easier for dev teams to ship code and develop apps and environments faster, in a more iterative format.
Key Takeaways
- A DevOps maturity model is a powerful way to assess the technical and skills-based maturity of an engineering team.
- The DevOps maturity model is broken into four stages: novice, intermediate, advanced, and elite.
- There are also four stages you need to follow when conducting a DevOps maturity assessment: prepare, evaluate, analyze, and to make an action plan.
What Is the DevOps Maturity Model?
A DevOps maturity model, or matrix, is an engineering diagnostic tool. It evaluates your current DevOps sophistication across many key areas. Using this, you can evaluate how to evolve your DevOps maturity along the right lines for your organization.
The model is broken into four stages:
- Novice
- Intermediate
- Advanced
- Elite.
It charts progress from manual, reactive processes to continuous deployment with integrated business alignment. It helps you benchmark current performance and plan next steps.
Integrated business alignment is essential and often not delivered properly. With this model, you can identify what needs improving.
Think of it as a fitness assessment for your DevOps engineering team. Just as physical fitness has measurable areas, DevOps maturity has clear and easy-to-assess indicators you can track and improve.
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Why Assess DevOps Maturity?
The advantages of DevOps assessments are the concrete benefits they deliver, such as:
- Optimize the use of resources. Identify where teams waste time on manual tasks that automation and AI could handle.
- Expose process failings. Hidden bottlenecks and problem areas become visible when you map your current workflows.
- Strengthen collaboration across teams. Assessments reveal communication gaps between dev, ops, vendors, and other teams.
- Improve your security posture. Identify where security practices lag behind development speed.
- Guide strategic investment in DevOps tooling. Instead of buying DevOps SaaS and AU tools randomly, you can make smarter investments based on actual gaps.
- Benefit from a competitive advantage. Faster, more reliable delivery translates directly to business results, revenue, growth, and profits.
Teams using integrated platforms like DuploCloud accelerate this process. DuploCloud eliminates overly complex DevOps processes and enables faster maturity across small and mid-sized teams.
Four Stages of the DevOps Maturity Matrix
Now, let’s walk through the four stages of DevOps maturity, as per the assessment best practices.
Stage 1: Novice
At this stage, engineering teams rely on manual deployments with minimal automation. Dev and ops engineers work in separate silos. Deployments happen infrequently and, unfortunately, often fail.
Characteristics:
- Manual server configuration
- No automated testing
- Deployments take hours or days, and can even include working hours of downtime.
- Teams blame each other when things go wrong, which is a regular occurrence.
Even teams without DevOps engineers can jumpstart with out-of-the-box automation and infrastructure as code with Duplocloud.
Stage 2: Intermediate
At this stage, some automation exists, with partial CI/CD implementation. Teams start collaborating, but this isn’t processes-driven or AI-supported, so it remains inconsistent across projects.
Characteristics:
- Basic CI/CD pipelines
- Some infrastructure automation
- Improved team communication
- Inconsistent practices across teams
With DuploCloud, you can benefit from CI/CD and GitOps pipelines that remove integration roadblocks that slow teams down.
Stage 3: Advanced
At this stage, there’s usually a full CI/CD implementation with comprehensive observability. DevOps teams use proactive monitoring and manage infrastructure through version control.
Characteristics:
- Automated testing and deployment
- Infrastructure as code everywhere
- Real-time monitoring and alerting
- Fast recovery from failures
Use DuploCloud with built-in Prometheus/Grafana monitoring, policy-as-code, and compliance-as-code to accelerate this stage.
Stage 4: Elite
Few teams reach this stage, and it may not be essential for success (for most teams). However, for those that do, teams use predictive analytics and continuous feedback loops to make constant improvements. Business and engineering alignment runs deep.
Characteristics:
- Predictive failure detection;
- Automated remediation;
- Data-driven decision making;
- Business metrics drive tech team and DevOps choices.
DuploCloud's platform enables automated drift detection and real-time monitoring that elite teams need. It now comes with an AI Help Desk to support DevOps teams.
Want to see how DuploCloud can transform your DevOps maturity and efficient operations? Benefit from a Free Demo Today.
Four Steps to Conduct a DevOps Maturity Assessment
Here are the four steps that DevOps and IT leaders need to follow to implement a DevOps maturity assessment.
Step 1: Preparation
Clearly define your scope. Focus on specific areas like CI/CD, automation, monitoring, and compliance.
At the same time, set clear objectives. For example, reducing change failure rates or increasing deployment frequency. Put together a cross-functional team with representatives from development, operations, security, and business stakeholders.
Step 2: Evaluation
Next, review your existing tools and processes. Look at deployment logs, observability dashboards, and IaC usage. Conduct team surveys to understand realistic pain points. Gather operational metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and recovery time.
Don't just look at the tools being used. Assess the team culture, communication patterns, and shared responsibilities.
Step 3: Analysis
Map your current capabilities to the DevOps maturity matrix. Be honest about gaps. Common gaps include lack of automated rollback, fragmented security practices, or missing observability.
Identify the biggest pain points that slow down delivery or create reliability issues. These should be what you fix first.
Step 4: Action Plan
Prioritize key initiatives based on impact and effort required. Focus on Iac, SLO enforcement, and CI/CD pipeline improvements. Set clear milestones with realistic timelines. Avoid trying to fix everything at once.
Platform-based approaches like DuploCloud's policy-based architecture fast-tracks maturity improvements without requiring in-house DevOps expertise.
Below are 10 useful questions you can use as a practical starting point for an assessment.
10 Key DevOps Maturity Assessment Questions
You can use these 10 questions as a helpful starting point for gauging your current DevOps maturity level:
- How frequently do you deploy to production? Elite teams deploy multiple times per day, not once a week or month.
- What's your change failure rate? Advanced teams keep this below 15%.
- How do you manage configuration changes? Advanced teams use infrastructure as code (IaC) for every aspect of the infrastructure.
- What's your alerting and monitoring strategy? Proactive monitoring is best, not simply reactive alerts.
- How is database management handled between dev and ops? Mature teams automate database deployments, making a better balance between dev and ops.
- How do you handle failures post-deployment? Fast recovery matters more than perfect deployments. Being able to roll-back is a useful part of this.
- What's the collaboration level between dev and ops? Shared, collaborative responsibilities indicate higher maturity.
- How is code quality ensured across the SDLC? Automated testing should happen at every stage.
- How do you learn from operational incidents? Learning-centric post-mortems and action items show maturity.
- How aligned are your engineering processes with business goals? Elite teams strongly connect technical metrics to business outcomes.
DuploCloud DevOps Maturity Assessment Framework
| Maturity Focus Area | DuploCloud Capabilities |
| Automation | Built-in CI/CD pipelines, low-code infrastructure as code (IaC), GitOps via FluxCD, and Terraform |
| Security & Compliance | SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA-ready frameworks with policy enforcement encoded and able to be deployed |
| Observability | Top-tier observability is included. Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry integrations out of the box |
| Self-Service Solutions | Developer self-service via UI and API to reduce bottlenecks |
| Governance | RBAC, drift detection, and infrastructure lifecycle enforcement are included. |
DevOps Maturity Closing Thoughts
DevOps maturity is an ongoing journey. It’s worth assessing your maturity regularly; once per quarter may be a good timeframe for most businesses.
Culture, processes, and continuous learning matter just as much as automation. Use what you have. Every step forward builds momentum for the next improvement.
DuploCloud helps teams adopt cloud-native DevOps practices with minimal effort and built-in compliance. Making it easier for your DevOps team to focus on delivering value to customers and stakeholders.
Want to see how DuploCloud can transform your DevOps maturity and efficient operations? Benefit from a Free Demo Today.
DevOps Maturity Assessment FAQs
What's the benefit of a DevOps maturity assessment?
This assessment provides a clear roadmap for improvement, helps prioritize investments, and ensures your DevOps evolution aligns with business goals.
Do I need to be an "Elite" DevOps org to succeed?
No, don’t worry that only the elite are successful. Most organizations operate at the Advanced level and don’t need to advance further. Elite practices are valuable but not required for competitive advantage.
Can a small team become DevOps mature?
Yes. Modern platforms reduce the expertise barrier and let small teams achieve advanced practices without large DevOps teams.
How long does it take to improve DevOps maturity?
It depends on your starting point and goals. Most teams see significant improvements within 6-12 months with focused effort and the right tools.
What roles do engineers play in this process?
Every DevOps engineer on your team plays an important role in evaluating an organization's current capabilities. The DevOps maturity level serves as a benchmark for measuring how effectively teams integrate their DevOps process throughout the software development lifecycle.
What’s the importance of developing a strong DevOps culture and strategy?
Establishing a strong DevOps culture starts with a DevOps maturity assessment framework. This needs to align with the relevant project management methodologies and streamlines deployment procedures.
Organizations must develop a clear DevOps strategy that emphasizes continuous integration practices to advance their overall maturity level across every stage of the DevOps lifecycle.
Does automation play a role in improving DevOps?
Automation testing is an important part that supports digital transformation initiatives. This also makes sure that DevOps teams follow the most current and robust best practices. An assessment framework helps organizations understand their current position and creates a roadmap for advancing through the four different maturity stages.
