All departments are accountable to the business. This includes areas with significant budgets like DevOps. But how do you measure software development and IT operations? The answer lies in the key performance indicators (KPIs). This article will cover the four recommended KPIs for DevOps plus a few bonus metrics. Keep reading to learn how to measure DevOps delivery value.
How to Measure DevOps Success
Software development operations need metrics for both performance and success.
KPIs drive DevOps success metrics. They also give DevOps teams valuable analytics to improve processes. They even bring focus to areas needing efficiencies.
When business goals and KPIs align, the DevOps team moves toward success.
This alignment empowers teams to improve their efficiency so they can deliver quality products and achieve goals faster.
Proper metrics lead to process improvement while the wrong metrics lead to disaster. They cause teams to chase the wrong goals that don’t deliver value to customers.
So what metrics do DevOps teams use to assess their value in delivery?
Here are four proven metrics to evaluate success:
Deployment Frequency
A common DevOps KPI is the speed of delivery. But this measurement means nothing unless the quality of the deliverable is high.
We know that metrics impact behaviour. That means relying on the speed of delivery as a KPI can lead employees to make the wrong choices.
Instead, the frequency of deployment is a better choice. In the past, the focus may have been pushing something haphazard out the door to meet a deadline. Today, the focus must be on making sure the weekly deliverable has intrinsic value.
How often can your team deploy software?
The frequency of deployment is the proportion of builds that make it into the hands of customers. This measurement doesn’t guarantee functionality at deployment. To reduce risk, some features get delivered in separate batches.
This batch process can isolate problems with delivery. When a subset of customers has problems, the DevOps team can face them individually. They can disable the functionality, improve it, or roll it back.
This way, the team can deploy smaller batches of changes at a higher level of confidence. This reduces negative impacts on systems and empowers upper management with information on the predictability of releases.
A weekly release date is ideal. If the team has a more complex release, holding it for an extra week for quality standards is acceptable. As precedence, they can reduce weekly releases to simpler updates.
This is not to say difficult solutions can get pushed back week after week. Customers must get updates fast, but they must also be accurate.
Change Failure Rate
Another KPI is Change Failure Rate, which identifies the percentage of workflow that doesn’t enter production.
By reducing the Change Failure Rate, other areas are affected too. For instance, a lower rate drives down the lead time and drives up the speed of delivery and quality of the product.
To reduce this lead time, teams need to analyze the end-to-end delivery process and assess wasted resources. The best solution could also be automating more processes.
The assessment must take all aspects of the workflow into consideration. A secondary measurement can include mean time to recover.
The key is removing or automating any step that is a key source of friction. Though keep in mind that sometimes service impairment or outages occur and increase lead time.
The change failure rate measures how quickly DevOps fixes the issues. Automation is always faster and more consistent than human resources. The more handed off to a system, the lower your lead time will drop.
Change Lead Time
Change lead time is also known as cycle time. The clock starts when the DevOps team makes an item a priority and coding begins. The more skilled the DevOps team, the faster the outputs.
A well-balanced team never fills their workflow beyond 80%. This planned margin of capacity covers any emergency work caused by downtime. The time is often used for fast responses to change requests.
But from a process standpoint, the measurement pertains to development efficiencies. Some hindrances might include slow deployment cycles and drawn-out approvals.
To reduce the longer cycle times, the DevOps team might consider the use of stream mapping. This process helps identify low-hanging fruit when it comes to time reductions.
The caveat to changing lead time is the dependency on story size. Story size or story points estimate the amount of effort on a part of the development. It’s influenced by the workload, risk and unknown factors, and complexity.
DevOps can create a consistent pace of workflow. This happens by reducing and standardizing story size. This improves predictability, which can reduce lead time.
For those teams that work in pairs, they can see a clearer delineation of work before the next rotation.
Mean Time to Restoration (MTTR)
The practice of measuring restoration of service originated during shutdowns. The goal was to determine how fast a system can react to a failure, including both automated and human responses.
This measures how fast DevOps resolves the functionality to fully restore services to the customer. It doesn’t matter if it’s for maintenance or unexpected downtime.
The measurement is about the team’s responsiveness rather than the issue itself. For instance, the downtime could be due to defects, unplanned outages, or other service impairments.
Regardless of the incident, the DevOps team needs to step up. They must be able to recover service within the contracted amount of time.
The higher level of the customer, the wiser it is to deploy the solution in small batches. This reduces the amount of risk for the customer’s data. It’s also an easier way to predict recovery time, which can keep a customer calm.
The best solution is always a preemptive one. Establishing a good monitoring tool can keep DevOps aware of issues and prevent most problems.
Proactive localized auto-remediation improves the team’s bottom line. These processes get built during the development phase of a project and might include automated health checks.
If proactive measures aren’t budgeted, there must be a conversation about guaranteed uptime.
Bonus Measurements
DevOps measurements must be customized for each business. The recommendations above are the most common measurement tools but are not meant to limit what you should measure.
The longest-running academic research in this field is DORA—DevOps Research and Assessment. They distilled their research down to four key traits and capabilities of an elite team.
The goal was to bring stability and standards to the industry. It was never designed to reduce KPIs but rather to make sure at least these four areas get covered. Some companies include extra KPIs in their measurements.
Customer Service
It’s critical to establish measurements that make sure customer problems get addressed with speed. Customer service metrics can be the difference between an issue turning into a major problem or an opportunity.
It also contributes to customer retention. Fast problem-solving endears customers to a company, but unresolved problems will turn them off.
The goal is to have the system inform the DevOps team about issues so they can fix them before the customer knows they’re affected. By measuring the impact of customer service, the organization can reach solutions faster and keep customers happy.
Live Monitoring
Automation can play a key role in your processes, but it also needs constant monitoring. To make sure all is well, the equipment and software should get tested often.
Processing is one of the key areas that need constant monitoring, including security and process testing. Code changes and automation also need monitoring.
Defect Rate
No matter how much expertise resides on the DevOps team, some defects go undetected. The defect rate is a measurement designed to hold the DevOps team accountable.
This metric captures any defects that escape the production line. The metric measures the defect as it makes its way through deployment.
The defect rate drives important process changes and can inspire more KPI strategies to improve efficiencies and quality products.
Valuable KPIs
The key to all DevOps metrics and KPIs is making sure that they are in alignment with the business goals. This coupling will help drive success.
KPIs are more than numbers on a weekly report. They enable the DevOps team to understand their performance. KPIs also provide a snapshot of the health of the business.
This gives management and team leads the opportunity for course correction. Critical adjustments can make alterations before expensive damage occurs. Also, the team will know how to execute strategies to meet or exceed their goals.
Knowing and executing the right KPIs will help you achieve results faster.
How to Measure DevOps Delivery Value
So how do you measure DevOps delivery value? Well, now you know. The four main KPIs are:
- Deployment frequency
- Change failure rate
- Change lead time
- Mean time to restoration
To meet business goals, your KPIs must align. This lets the business measure the cost of downtime and drives predictability of recovery.
Contact Aequilibrium to learn how we can build you a measurable DevOps culture. We use lean operating models and playbooks to help your team align with your business. The end result is faster success and higher-value deployments.
