As anyone who spends time with their family over the holidays can attest, the notion of maturity is a highly subjective concept.

Whether it’s sizing up the next generation’s advancement or defaulting to time-honored inter-sibling behaviors, annual get-togethers offer tangible proof of what’s new and those things that likely won’t ever change.

In the domain of DevOps – an umbrella concept that encompasses a massive array of processes and supporting capabilities – gauging the maturity of your organization’s standing is also a highly interpretive task.

Given that “DevOps” means something different to nearly every organization, based on its unique makeup, methodologies, tools, and most importantly, business goals, attempting to measure progress against any outside model may seem an effort of limited value.

That said, as an increasing number of organizations seek to embrace DevOps, and growing recognition that well-worn stories of leading-edge “unicorns” don’t relate closely to most people’s real-world expectations, many teams are left wondering where their own efforts stand, especially in comparison to their peers.

To help acquit this pursuit, and allow organizations to scope their progress, CA recently launched the second iteration of its online DevOps Assessment.

Split into three short surveys covering core limbs of the DevOps tree – “Develop and Test”, “Release and Deploy”, and “Manage and Monitor” – this free tool offers detailed insight into how your organization’s maturity stacks up to that of other practitioners.

For instance, in the domain of development, how well do your teams fare in defining and managing requirements, and then presenting them to others in a structured manner? Related to release cycles, are your teams truly meeting business-driven expectations for more frequent application deployments, shorter lead times, and higher success rates? Or, when it comes to applications monitoring, are you able to distinguish the most critical and recurrent problems and how they truly impact business services?

These are perhaps some of the most fundamental questions that one could apply to measurement of DevOps adoption in general, but further investigation attempts to take a closer look at more finite, underlying issues.

Are your development teams accurately replicating realistic conditions from production systems to create virtual services and testing scenarios? Are your application release deployments fully automated across development, test and production environments? Can your teams monitor complete business services that link user experience, transactions and applications to infrastructure to pinpoint any root cause issues?

The best thing about the survey is that it immediately provides visibility into how your answers compare to those of previous respondents. There’s no fuzzy math or editorial interpretation (though we may highlight trends in a report at some point), merely instant validation, and the option to create a customized report card charting where your efforts stand in relation to those of your peers.

If you’re wondering precisely just how to achieve your long-term DevOps goals comparative to where you stand today, it might even be worth leveraging some of the involved questions for the purpose of evolving process and methodology.

The only remaining questions are: Do you think that you’re ahead of the curve? Are you afraid to find out just how far you’re behind the crowd? And most importantly, what do you have to lose?

Take the survey today and get a real-world fix on your overall level of DevOps maturity. Guaranteed it’s a far more informative activity than debating family and friends over whose turn it is to carve the turkey, or wash the dishes.