My random thoughts on devops maturity level. Overarching objective of devops is to roll out code changes for the requirements to the production as quickly as possible and hence letting business realize the value at higher pace.
Devops maturity could be considered as the function of frequency of release vs error rate. To cope up with business, IT speeds up the frequency of release. Natural implication of shorter release cycle with continuous delivery of code to production is the increased error rate leading to user churn. This is shown as ‘natural tendency’ curve in the above picture. However with adopting modern devops practices such as – test automation, deployment automation, canary releases, error monitoring, continuous delivery – we could achieve the desirable curve of ‘successful devops’ (refer the picture).
Frequency of release has a high congruence on the process maturity. Waterfall usually deliver in months, agile scrum in weeks, extreme programming (xp) in days and kanban in hours.
Depends on where we are on the graph, quadrants rate us and instruct the next step.
Note – I’ve abstracted the nitty-gritty away and keeping it short presenting at conceptual level.