We all have been long enough in the IT industry to understand that the Software Development Life Cycle has come a long way from operating in the sequential and silo-ed Waterfall model to being Agile and collaborative. To be able to cut down the time-to-market and optimize costs, the evolution of the Waterfall software development processes was necessary, giving birth to the new ways of working with extensive adoption of Agile and DevOps. The topic DevOps – Best Practices in the Agile world’ which is a vast subject and I have endeavored to put together the content covering most of the aspects of DevOps with a certain level of depth; which I observed, implemented, learned during working in various organizations including the research of my own. Below are the sub-topics covered in this article :
1. Introduction – Agile and DevOps
2. Cultural Transformation
3. Governance through Metrics
4. Automation
5. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
6. Centralized Agile and DevOps philosophies
7. Continuous Deployment
8. Myths and Pitfalls
12. Velocity Quality Performance Stability Security
Adoption and
Maturity
Lead Time to
Environment – SIT,
Stage, Production
Project size Commit Frequency
Mean Time to
Recover
Security Quality
(Security Defects
avoided etc)
Backlog health
Code Wait Time –
SIT, Stage,
Production
Code violations Delivery Status
Mean time to
detect
Dynamic/static
Security Score
Burndown velocity
Duplications Instant Team Velocity
Mean time to
incident resolution
Static/dynamic
security issues
Burnup velocity
Code complexity Estimation Deviation
Mean time
between system
incident
static/dynamic issue
lifetime
Velocity, committed vs
delivered
Unit Test coverage
Defects distribution
in a team
Net Loss –
Aggregation of the
business impact
aggregated by the
period query
Tool adoption%
Number of
defects/Number of
regression
defects/number of
old defects
Delta in lines of code
Green Build –
Build success% >
90%
(Minimize merge
related issues)
Practices Adoption%
%Test automation
coverage and % Test
Execution
Reviewers Activity
Defect Detection %
Technical Debt
Critical Defect
Detection %
Four main metrics that every project needs to
track (as described in ‘Accelerate’ and
recommended by DORA)
1. Lead time for changes
2. Change failure rate
3. Deployment frequency
4. Mean time to recovery
Few more that stream-aligned teams monitor
Balanced team
Full-time owner
Shared understanding
A focus on value and metrics
Proof-of-concept
Managed dependencies to maintain velocity
