Like many of you, a number of our customers are undergoing DevOps transformations in order to decrease the time it takes for them to deliver value to their customers. While it seems like everyone is “doing DevOps” these days, there’s not really a standard definition of what that means. At Tasktop, we take the big picture view of DevOps: connecting teams, automating processes and eliminating waste across the entire software development lifecycle – not just focusing on continuous integration and continuous delivery. Breaking down silos so everyone is working together toward a common goal. Sounds nice, right?
Here’s the thing – you’re not really working toward a common goal if you’re still only using the same siloed metrics that you were before you started your DevOps journey. What are you measuring? Story cycle time, number of open defects, defect MTTR, percentage of tests passed, story points delivered, sprint burn down? They’re still important metrics at a departmental level, but they’re not going to tell you how much faster you’re delivering value to your customers. And they’re definitely not going to tell you how you can make that time even faster.
Let’s use defect resolution as an example. If you are measuring defect resolution time as the period between when a defect is logged in your defect tracking tool and when it’s marked as resolved in that same tool, you’re not getting the whole picture. What if instead you measured from the time an incident is reported to the service desk to the time the fix is put into production? You’d have the true defect cycle time – the time it takes a defect to flow through your entire value chain. This is a great start, but in order to speed things up, you’re going to need to know why it took that long. Did it take two days to determine that the incident reported to the service desk was actually a defect? Did the defect sit in the development team’s backlog for a week before it was fixed? How much time was it waiting to be re-tested? In order to find and eliminate the bottlenecks, you need to know how long each step of your process takes.
So how do you decrease the time to deliver value to customers by eliminating bottlenecks? You need to connect your software lifecycle and establish end-to-end traceability. Then you need to collect data on each step of the process to find out where you can improve. It’s a journey of continuous improvement.
Want to learn more about this and other scenarios ? Watch our on demand webinar to learn how our customers are using connected lifecycle data to guide their DevOps journeys.
