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The Two Most Important Metrics for DevOps

In my earlier blogpost I discussed the purpose of DevOps, namely reducing the time and effort it takes to put software into production and allowing for more (continuous) production deployments.

Why is this important? The typical answer is that in the digital age, SPEED is the name of the game and it is important to be able to increase the speed to market of IT solutions. Doesn’t everyone expect cool new features for their favorite software to be available on an on-going basis? Doesn’t “the business” require enhancements and new capabilities in business applications to be in production as quickly as possible? So great, DevOps (and Agile) should give us this speed to production. But how is success measured? Increased frequency of releases? Reduction in the amount of time it takes to perform a deployment? Reduction in the lead time from the start of a “project” to the production release of this project? Levels of automation? All these are certainly valid ways to measure progress in DevOps, but they are not the most critical “macro” metrics that tell us if we have improved SPEED in IT. These are WIP and Throughput.

Let’s start with WIP. WIP stands for Work in Process and represents the sum of all the cost tied up in the entire IT department forall ongoing projects and feature development efforts that have been started but not yet been put in production. So, this is really all the capital tied up in the system at any given time trying to produce software. If a decision was made to halt all development activities, this number would represent all the investment dollars that would have to be written off. Any time a new project starts or any time effort is expended on existing projects WIP is increasing. Any time a project or feature set is put in production WIP is reduced by the amount of the investment made on this project or feature set. If a project is cancelled mid-stream, WIP is similarly reduced by a write-off of the corresponding investment. [...]

 

To read the whole post and interact, please visit the SogetiLabs blog: The Two Most Important Metrics for DevOps