Every business needs a DevOps initiative regardless of industry. Many are striving to transform an existing organization to make the most out of DevOps practices - including deployment automation and continuous delivery.
It's an old adage that 'what cannot be measured cannot be managed.' But does that also apply to measure mindset or behavior? Therein lies the struggle with measuring DevOps. However, with DevOps training, the key performance indicators for the practice can be improved.
A Fresh Introduction to DevOps
First, it's essential to go through the concept behind DevOps once again to be able to understand its benefits and identify its key performance indicators. DevOps does not refer to a tool or a set of tools. It is more about behavior - the right mindset required for leveraging and utilizing the right tools for improving and shortening software development life cycles.
The role of DevOps is not to erase the individuality of IT operations and software development, but instead, it is to build a bridge to collaborate the two ideas without discontinuing the current processes of each discipline independently.
The most prominent and measurable benefits of DevOps include:
- Improved defect detection
- Shorter development cycle
- Reduce recovery time in times of failure
- Reduced rollbacks and deployment failure
- Increased release velocity
These benefits and many more can be used as the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business to track. Additionally, companies can also encourage the team for DevOps training course to be able to provide a more streamlined delivery.
Understanding the Key Metrics
As far as the metrics are concerned, there are four basic types, and all of your KPIs will fit into either one of these four categories:
Effectiveness and Efficiency
Generally, these metrics are used for measuring operational capabilities and development capacity of an organization. But a recent shift in the focus has changed it into a more customer-centric ratio.
Velocity
A successful DevOps practice guarantees a speedy application delivery. Tracking velocity will give you a clear idea if the business applications are improving and if there is an increase in the business demand and growth in IT's responsiveness. Tracking it will show if the organization has truly adopted automation of the processes by eliminating isolated or manual tasks to boost their market time.
Quality
According to a 2017 DevOps report, the demand to deploy more frequently and faster can affect the quality of the IT performers. However, some high-performing IT experts will continue to keep up with stability without getting distracted by the speed pressure.
High IT performers consider quality as a shared responsibility and make sure it is present in the development process without any compromise.
Collaboration, culture, and sharing
As far as DevOps is concerned, the vitality of communication, integration, and collaboration between operation and development cannot be stressed further. Simply implementing technology and processes may not be enough. It is crucial to adopt this shift to implement a continuous, agile deployment and delivery process.
Key Performance Indicators and DevOps Training
To start with, it is important to first identify the challenges faced by your organization to decide on the DevOps metrics to track. You can then efficiency use your team of experts to solely focus on those certain metrics to keep an eye on the DevOps challenges.
Here are the top KPIs and how DevOps training can improve them.
Deployment Frequency
For development practices, increasing deployment frequency is crucial. The ability to change the coding efficiency and without any trouble, naturally offers a competitive advantage to a company in need of delivering new features to customers.
The most popular IT organizations engage in deploying more applications and much faster. They may carry out multiple deployments per day as compared to inefficient IT organizations. The benefit of frequent deployments is that it reduces the probability of disruption, which may result from more infrequent and complex deployments.
A team equipped with excellent DevOps understanding is in a better position to deliver collaboration-based learning points and knowledge. DevOps training enables the team to cooperate, communicate, and collaborate for better results.
Speed of Deployment
The key is to measure the speed of a single deployment. A high-performance organization may hardly take an hour for the process while low IT performing organizations can take up to months.
A DevOps trained team is likely to automate and standardize their job definitions to saving more time in production, efficiently fix errors, and carry out a more planned work. A well-equipped team with DevOps knowledge tends to avoid manual intervention and poor communication.
The saved time is used for other value-added services, which also helps in increasing the revenue of the organization.
Failure rates
While it is great to implement a more quick and frequent deployment of the system, it is equally important for the organization to minimize failure rate. In fact, if the changes implemented frequently fail too, the result is nil.
At average, the cost of critical application failure can fall between $500k to $1m per hour. When deployments fail frequently, it also tends to slow down the overall services. As a result, an organization loses both customers and revenue.
DevOps training ensures the team uses improved defect detection methods to significantly reduce post- and pre-deployment issues. As a result, there are lesser rollbacks.
Reduced Recovery Time
Failures can be reduced but not eliminated completely. Therefore, it is important to have a recovery plan in case a failure occurs. This helps improve operational efficiency in a traditional IT environment.
A trained team will ensure that the most important recover benefits of DevOps include:
- Performance-oriented culture
- Improved ability to innovate and research
- Increased collaboration and communication
DevOps training is meant to equip the team with all the crucial knowledge required to increase business value. This is done by making the organization agile through the continuous and efficient delivery of products and services and by ensuring 100% customer satisfaction.
While you can always refer to these metrics and key performance indicators to measure the outcomes associated with DevOps, other metrics you can look up to include retention rates, employee morale, and responsiveness to change within your working environment.