In a large enterprise, DevOps leaders may be required to report on DevOps governance. For example, how many product teams and/or application teams are “doing DevOps”? How well are they “doing DevOps”?
This is a valid concern. Product-based, granular DevOps productivity metrics, such as DORA metrics, may be too detailed for senior IT leaders. They may want more high level data telling them how much of their product and/or application estate follows DevOps processes.
This is a higher level of abstraction then the presentation of DORA metrics at the application or product level. A very simple example of a higher level abstraction may be “How many teams are collecting DORA metrics?” “Are we capable of harvesting DevOps metrics?”
Enterprise Level
At the enterpise, or top-down, level senior IT leaders may want an overview of how well the enterprise is doing DevOps. DevOps governance across departments will measure what percentage of products are following DevOps processes.
One approach could be to start by measuring CI/CD compliance, as CI and CD are foundational DevOps processes. Then look at the number of changes and incidents that are happening across the product estate.
Example Enterprise level DevOps Governance Report
Then, at higher levels of governance maturity, we can start measuring:
- percentage of products automating change approvals
- levels of test automation (e.g. code coverage percentages)
- numbers of commits per product
Department Level
Delving down to the Department Level, we may want to an overview of how well our department’s products are doing DevOps.
DevOps governance across products can be measured in a number of ways, but ideally should align to our DevOps operating model.
Example Department Level DevOps Governance Report
Product Level
At the product or bottom-up level, the first level of DevOps governance should be DORA metrics. This is typically where teams start. They want to understand the speed and reliability of the changes they are making to their product.
There are well established patterns and best practices explaining how to do collect and present DORA metrics at this level of granularity, so we won’t go into detail here other than to show an example DORA metrics dashboard below.
Example Product Level DORA DevOps Metrics
