DevOps has taken hold in IT. A growing number of organizations are adopting DevOps to deliver applications and services at higher speed; evolve and improve products at a faster pace than in a traditional software development and infrastructure management environment; and better serve their customers. After realizing the benefits of development and operations teams working together instead of in siloed environments, organizations are fast embracing the idea of DevOps.
To move forward in the DevOps journey, companies first should outline, identify and map the areas where they need improvement. Having a clear idea of maturity of your current IT infrastructure will help you greatly in that process.
What is a DevOps Assessment?
Adopting DevOps practices is not a one-day process. And, if it’s not done correctly, companies can do more harm than benefit. So, it is necessary for any organization to know whether the practices they are following are in line with the DevOps initiative. A DevOps assessment is nothing but a set of questions that personnel from different organizational areas can answer. Based on the analysis of the answers, the organization can see whether it is moving in the right direction. DevOps assessment helps outline current maturity and identify a road map of improvement areas.
Why go for a DevOps Assessment?
An organization with continuously changing IT and performance needs might be thinking of going for—or may have already started—a DevOps initiative. It’s important to ask the following questions:
- Do I really need DevOps?
- Is my infrastructure flexible enough for DevOps?
- What value is DevOps going to add to my business?
- Are my DevOps strategies right?
If yes, then the DevOps assessment is totally built for you.
What Are the Typical Questions in a DevOps Assessment?
A DevOps assessment comprises of three stages: Dev and Test, Release and Deploy, and Manage and Monitor—all of which are part of any product development cycle. The assessment includes questions mostly about production test cases and environment, test cases and test data, the level of automation, complexity, visibility, proficiency in the dev-test-release-deploy-manage processes, etc.
What Can You Achieve with a DevOps Assessment?
Once a DevOps assessment has been completed, organizations can get a clear idea of functional areas which are underperforming, performing as expected or overperforming.
A typical DevOps assessment report provides an evaluation of an organization’s current DevOps ability and recommendations for improvements based on the responses. Not only that, the organization also can get an idea of where it is compared to its competition, the expertise it needs to cement its position, the most valuable talent assets in the organization and the talent pool the organization needs to recruit. A DevOps assessment can help the organization align its software development and IT operations processes with business goals, and ship products faster without compromising with quality and with more reliability because of increased agility and ability to adapt to changes.
In short, it will help:
- Technical teams to baseline their performance and understand strengths as well as areas of improvement
- Recruitment team to develop capabilities and recruit related talent
- Management team to target the investment areas
- Operations team to understand the most critical operations
While DevOps has proven its accelerative impacts on development processes and timelines and quality assurance, it also imposes demands that every organization must be ready to address. DevOps Assessment is a real necessity to get an idea of where you are and where you can be on your DevOps journey.
About the Author / Chaitanya Jawale
Chaitanya Jawale is founder and CEO of Opcito Technologies, a leader in microservice-based product engineering and automation. Chaitanya comes with strong background in product engineering, datacenter automation, DevOps and multi-cloud orchestration and management.
