As DevOps become more advanced, the importance of integrating metrics is becoming more and more apparent. It’s not enough anymore for organizations to simply utilize DevOps; they must demonstrate its ROI as well as a tangible connection to business objectives and continuous process improvements.
These are valid business requests, and developing a metric-focused program that rises to the occasion requires a strategic approach. A good starting point is for organizations to agree on what they will measure and how, thus opening the door for developing organizational benchmarks.
Insights from industry research
A useful tool in this journey is Google’s annual Accelerate State of DevOps survey, compiled by its DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team. Commonly referred to as DORA metrics, this survey is now in its eighth year and aims to provide data-driven industry insights that examine the capabilities and practices driving software delivery as well as operational and organizational performance.
DORA metrics evaluate four key components of software performance:
Lead time to change – time from code committed to deployed to productionDeployment frequency – how often an app deploys to production
Change failure rate – percentage of deployments requiring rollbacks and/or fixes
Mean time to restore – how long it takes systems to restore after a failure in production
Additionally, DORA uses these metrics to segment development teams into Elite, High, Medium and Low-Performing categories. Their research indicates that Elite teams are twice as likely to meet or exceed their organizational performance goal.
One key finding from this year’s report is that only 37% of enterprises are satisfied with their software release processes, while 79% feel bogged down by inefficient or legacy systems. Clearly we have some work to do to achieve the full promise of DevOps!
Improve DevOps ROI
Like any new initiative, aligning your organization around DORA metrics takes some time. The first step to getting value from DORA metrics is securing management and stakeholder buy-in, and fortunately, this isn’t that difficult, according to Gaurav Kheterpal, Salesforce MVP and founder and CEO of Vanshiv Technologies. By understanding the quantifiable value that DORA metrics enable and how that relates to overall development lifecycle efficiency, stakeholders are likely to support the implementation of these metrics.
One solution that consistently ranks high on DORA metrics and outperforms other products is Flosum. If you compare Flosum’s customers’ performance to that of organizations at large, the Flosum impact on DevOps quality is evident: Flosum customers are 1.2x more likely to be a high-performance DevOps organization.
Schedule a free, no strings attached demo today to take your DevOps to the next level.
To hear more from Kheterpal and other Salesforce experts Andrew Cook, technical Salesforce instructor at Salesforce Ben, and Veroljub Mihajlovic, senior product marketing leader at Flosum, listen to our webinar Achieving High-Performing Salesforce DevOps with Metrics.
