In recent years, organizations across the globe have embarked on the DevOps journey to reimagine their business and stay ahead. And DevOps has indeed empowered businesses to develop and deliver software quickly and reliably and drive organizational performance. However, only a few organizations are successful at realizing the full potential of DevOps implementation. The reason is that they are able to measure DevOps. Let’s delve deep into why businesses need to measure DevOps:
Why Measure DevOps?
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure”. This is the mantra that businesses must live by in the DevOps ecosystem.
A DevOps transformation often requires significant investment in terms of time, money, and resources. Moreover, it requires modernizing everything from communication practices to training methodologies to software tools. So, in order to ensure that the DevOps journey doesn’t go astray, businesses need the ability to assess DevOps performance benchmarks, clearly and accurately. Making DevOps measurable is imperative to define and invest in processes that work, continuously improve the practices according to the market change, track performance, and ensure peak productivity. (Looking to learn more about DevOps observability? Read our blog here: DevOps observability: What is it and how to implement it?)
How to Measure DevOps: DevOps Metrics and KPIs
Once you have implemented DevOps, it’s time to know whether it helped you gain value. It’s imperative to measure the value delivered by the new collaboration and culture. Wondering how? DevOps metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the answer here.
DevOps metrics and KPIs are the quantifiable measures that directly reveal the performance of the DevOps initiatives. They help you gain visibility into the software development processes and accordingly identify areas of improvement. More specifically, DevOps metrics and KPIs enable DevOps teams to measure the performance of collaborative workflows and track the progress of achieving high-level goals including increased quality, faster release cycles, and improved application performance.
Over time, innumerable metrics and KPIs came into the limelight, pushing businesses into a corner on which metrics to track. Taking due heed of this challenge, Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has extended its support.
What are DORA metrics?
The DORA team has conducted research for seven years to identify the key metrics that precisely indicate the performance of the DevOps initiative. During the research, the team collected data from over 32,000 professionals worldwide and analyzed it to gain an in-depth understanding of DevOps practices and capabilities that drive performance. The team identified four key metrics, namely Deployment Frequency (DF), Lead Time for Changes (LT), Mean Time to Restore (MTTR), and Change Failure Rate (CFR), that serve as a guide to measure the performance of the software development team.
Why do we need DORA metrics?
Every business, irrespective of its DevOps maturity, needs the DORA metrics as they are a great way to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their DevOps processes. While deployment frequency and lead time for changes help teams to measure velocity (software delivery throughput) and agility, the change failure rate and time to restore service help measure stability (quality). These metrics enable teams to find how successful they are at DevOps and identify themselves as elite, high, medium, and low performing teams.
Breaking down the four main DORA metrics
Let’s delve into the details on how to measure the four key software delivery performance metrics:
