Developer Velocity Assessment

“DevOps DevOps DevOps!! We keep hearing this term and, in our journey, to become fully DevOps, we have adopted many different tools, changed a lot of processes but we are still not sure if we are moving ahead or not?”

The above statement or some variation of it is something I have been hearing a lot from different customers across different industries. My response to these inquiries now revolves around two main aspects, KPIs and DVAs (Developer Velocity Assessments).
What KPIs are you using to assess your SDLC? DORA metrics such as “Lead time for change”, “Deployment Frequency”, “Time to Restore Service” and “Change Failure Rate” are great ones to start with here. But my focus for this post is around DVAs and how they can help you very quickly quantify where you are at in your DevOps transformation journey.

The Developer Velocity Assessment made available by Microsoft and based on research by McKinsey & Company is a great simple tool to get you started.

I have ran this assessment for multiple customers using it as a “Listen & Learn” tool to understand where my customers are from a DevOps maturity perspective. The report produced by the assessment gives you an overall score and it also breaks it down by “Components of Developer Velocity” such as Architecture, tooling and others.
I have also found that the conversations that take place during the assessment to be much more valuable than the actual report that this assessment produces.

Below is a glimpse of the report that get produced after the completion of the assessment. There is also an option to export the results to csv for a more detailed view with actual links to Microsoft documentation.

This Assessment has become an essential tool in my tool-belt to kick-off DevOps conversations with my customers, please give the assessment a try and if you have any feedback around the tool, please do share.