DevOps integration’s primary objective is to reduce the software development life cycle and deliver high-quality software consistently.
However, integrating DevOps does not guarantee outright success. It would help if you tracked the success of DevOps through KPI measurements. In this post, we have discussed best practices to follow for DevOps KPI measurement.
Increased Deployment Frequency
Bulky deployment is a thing of the past. No single deployment should go beyond an extended period. According to DevOps experts, you need to aim for more releases and deployments to help more interaction with the end-user.
The deployment should be planned, and you need to keep track of deployments of the frequency to ensure the development cycle is progressing as planned. All this helps in planning small deployments that reflect in improved release cycles and testing.
Smaller deployment frequency provides you with better insights and enables you to understand which changes were beneficial and what areas need improvements. Reducing deployment frequency might indicate workflow is imbalanced, or there are other issues like staffing problems or more attention to other projects.
Deployment frequency metrics that indicate consistent increases and steadiness of deployments are ideal signs of sustainable growth and deployment.
Change Volume
DevOps market experts often mention software development is all about coding, and it is a deciding factor. Change of volume relates to lines of codes pushed into production per software deployment.
Measuring this KPI is vital in measuring the deployment success in terms of time, value, and frequency. The philosophy of DevOps considers frequent changes to the code as refinement.
The end goal of the change volume should not be minor changes. The changes should be more focused on updates that provide better user experience with minimal disruption.
It would help if you tracked the change volume in each deployment for an accurate picture of progress.
Change Failure Rate
This KPI explains the degree of release failure due to outages or other failures. For one, a low change failure rate indicates timely and faster deployments.
Also, a high change failure rate means poor application performance, which affects end-user satisfaction. Though increasing deployment frequency is one of the best practices, it shouldn’t come with a high failure rate.
If the frequent deployed changes have a high failure rate, it directly affects user satisfaction and revenue.
Hence, it would be best if you focused on increasing deployment frequency while achieving a low change failure rate. If the KPI indicates a high change failure rate often, it is time to scale back and think of long-term solutions to deal with existing issues.
Meantime to Recovery
Meantime to Recovery is an important KPI that measures the time required to recover from a failed instance. It defines your company’s ability to address issues. The ability to measure the business impact and user experience repercussions gives you the insights to fully understand and prioritize issues.
The Meantime to Recovery measures several things like the average time required to go from detecting a failure to implementing the resolution. It also provides answers like whether the user experienced errors, lost access, or abandoned, the Application Company needs to improve the meantime to Recovery KPI to reduce costs, impact the problems, and protect user satisfaction.
Lead Time
Lead time is an important KPI if the end goal of your company is faster shipping of the product. The KPI measures time starting from the initial start of the project to the deployment phase.
It helps you get the estimated time required for a specific task from start to production. This metric allows you to check the workflow and productivity.
Lower lead times indicate the DevOps team is productive, adaptive, and capable of addressing feedback quickly or in a time-bound manner.
Defect Escape Rate
The defect escape rate indicates how fast defects are recognized at a pre-production stage compared to the production phase. The KPI shows defects are natural in the software development cycle and should be identified at earlier production stages.
Customer Feedback
Seamless user experience is one of the objectives of implementing DevOps. Customer satisfaction is crucial as it translates into sales and generates revenue.
As a result, customer feedback is an important KPI to measure the success of DevOps. Customers should not become reporting sources of errors and issues with your application.
Companies need to reduce the number of customer feedback/tickets that indicate that application development is going the right way.
These are some of the best practices you need to follow when measuring KPIs for DevOps success. The idea behind studying KPIs is analyzing the performance and efficiency of the development cycle.
By following the best practices, you can ensure you achieve optimal efficiency in the development cycle.
