DevOps Maturity Assessment: Level Up Your DevOps Processes

DevOps is the product-oriented approach to software development and support that is the current ‘it’ of the industry as it shows high change management effectiveness and perpetuates the culture of constant learning and improvement. Dev and Ops should strive to work as a single organism with a maximized effort and all processes aimed at a common goal – continuously delivering value.

According to the 2021 State of DevOps Report by Puppet, as many as 78% of DevOps practitioners find themselves stuck somewhere in the middle of their DevOps evolution. This shows just how many organizations still have a way to go in reaching the full potential of their DevOps maturity. Still, they get to enjoy the benefits that come along the way:

• easier adaptability to changes,
• improved efficiency,
• easier scalability,
• faster time-to-market,
• enhanced quality,
• and more.

Inevitably, more opportunities for business growth come along the way. If you want your business to reap all the benefits of having mature DevOps processes, it starts with understanding where you are in your DevOps journey so far. And that’s where DevOps maturity model comes into play.

What is DevSecOps Maturity Model? 

DevOps maturity model determines how far along you are in your DevOps implementation and lets you map out your further route to perpetuate growth. Essentially, it should tell you how mature your processes are right now, what needs improvement, and how you can get to the next checkpoint in your DevOps maturity journey.

DevOps requires a continuous effort on the part of your team, and you have to understand that this is an ongoing process without a set end-point. An organization can’t just implement it as a one-time action and be done with it. What’s important to understand is that you are setting out on an adventure with your priorities set to delivering value and progressing over time in your processes and output. Therefore, you will want to eventually assess your organization’s DevOps maturity to determine what are your successes, what pitfalls and setbacks you should be aware of, what issues may pop up further along the way, and how you can prepare for them right now.

DevOps is all about embracing that philosophy and changing your mindset to one of continuous growth and evolution of your processes. Understanding your DevOps maturity helps estimate where you are standing and adjust for the future challenges and successes.

Where are you in your DevOps journey?

How to know if you have successfully taken down the barrier between development and operations? Has your company established mature DevOps processes or are you still struggling to get it off the ground? Knowing the level of your organization’s DevOps maturity is a necessary step in the process that you will have to take. Every organization will eventually find itself at a point where it needs to determine where it’s standing and how to proceed. DevOps maturity is more about getting the right tools. It starts with adopting a culture of continuous change and striving for excellence.

So, how mature is your DevOps team? These are the general cues to tell you your level of DevOps maturity.

DevOps maturity levels

Level 1. Initial. Dev and Ops teams work in silos.
Level 2. Managed. Change of mindset with introduction of Agile. Initial automation. Collaboration is encouraged.
Level 3. Defined and measured. DevOps team is established. Processes and tools for monitoring and automation.
Level 4. Automated. Consistent processes and monitoring. Continuous improvement.
Level 5. Optimized. DevOps team is mature in its processes and practices continuous value delivery.

How to measure DevOps maturity

Since you already have an idea of what maturity stands for when it comes to establishing and running DevOps processes, let’s talk about what to look at exactly in terms of processes and procedures, if you need to know where you are standing with your DevOps maturity. Consider what is your state of the art for the following points in our DevOps maturity checklist? How many can you tick off?

DevOps maturity checklist

Automation (CI/CD). To what extent have you embraced automation in your testing, build and deployment operations? Automating the routine tasks allows for optimizing all your processes and minimizing the risk of human error. This helps your team be more efficient and direct their time and efforts towards more complex tasks. Automation is what helps establish a culture of continuous integration (CI) and delivery (CD) and promotes Business Agility.

Documentation. Are you consistent with your documentation upkeep? Is it accessible for all team members to use and contribute? Documentation is the gene sequence of your application. Creating sufficient quality documentation of your processes and keeping it up-to-date can be a dealbreaker for your operational efficiency and continuity long term.

Disaster recovery. How ready is your DevOps team, really? What is your established process of disaster recovery and how prepared are your Devs to act upon any signs of system inconsistencies? Do they have an efficient and up-to-date disaster recovery plan? How fast can they apply it in case an incident occurs? Another important point you may want to address is redundancy planning or having all your system components duplicated for easy recovery in case of system failure.

Business metrics monitoring. Another one of those checkpoints that can never be overlooked in DevOps is keeping track of your business metrics and immediately responding to issues just as they occur. After all, the sooner you investigate and get it fixed, the better it is for business continuity and providing good-quality service. In the case with our client Goat Interactive, Symphony Solutions team worked on setting rules for data monitoring and incident response criteria to ensure that the cloud managed services team is able to fix the issues and avoid escalation if possible.

Security. How secure is your software development lifecycle? As you are caught up in the race with competition, it’s easy to swerve off the tracks and leave gaps in your security. DevOps is meant to prevent that with one of its main objectives being setting and following strict security standards at all stages of software development. DevSecOps maturity assessment implementation is a viable option to consider.

DevOps maturity assessment tools

An essential step in your DevOps maturity journey is equipping your team with the right toolset to achieve efficiency and high quality of output. Depending on what task you need to accomplish, you can find the software tools that work best for you and your team.

There are no inherently right or wrong tools. There is just what works for you. 

Summing up

Sufficient DevOps maturity will allow a company to gain momentum to continuously improve its product and bring software to the market by having solidly established processes with the one goal of delivering value to the customer.

DevOps should be considered separately as its own entity, so you don’t necessarily need to set up your own in-house team in order to benefit from what they can bring to the table. In fact, many would argue that it’s more convenient and hassle-free if you set yourself up with a DevOps managed services team and have them manage your infrastructure. In the long run, you want to have a solid process going for continuous value delivery and know that your DevOps is up to standard compared with what your competitors have to brag about. Where upskilling, team education and consultancy are handled by your service provider.

That’s what is so excellent about setting up your DevOps processes, that you can put your trust into a reliable DevOps services provider and free up your time and brain power to come up with new features for your product, knowing that the process is set and running without a hitch. Symphony Solutions can set you up with an expert team to provide DevOps services – all to put your application delivery on a fast track, up your quality standards, and not blow out a hole in your budget as you’re at it. Carry on delivering value to your clients and know that an expert team of DevOps has got your back when it comes to orchestrating an efficient DevOps strategy for your product development and delivery – from improvements throughout the process to reliable automation of the mundane activities prone to human error.

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