January 13, 2021
Key to Improve DevOps Efficiency

Keys to Improve Salesforce DevOps Efficiency

Enterprises today need more speed and agility! Whether for getting ahead of the competition or to survive in the post-pandemic disrupted market or simply to stay relevant and bring more to the table.

According to the latest Puppet 2020 State of DevOps Report, setting a platform approach to software delivery and applying DevOps principles to change management can help organizations scale their DevOps initiatives.

But many large organizations struggle to achieve high Salesforce DevOps efficiency and performance because of conflicts (real and perceived) with existing IT processes. A lot many enterprises are stuck when it comes to transformation. Plenty of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders still face roadblocks implementing and scaling a DevOps practice. According to a Harvard study, Only 10% of CIOs say they are successful at rapid software deployment

According to the State of Modern Applications in Enterprises Report 2020, only 37% of enterprise respondents are satisfied with how fast they are currently delivering new software or features. Although delivering better quality software faster is a top priority for almost 79% of enterprises, enterprises are bogged down by complex legacy infrastructure, existing inefficient time-consuming processes, governance, compliance, security, and organizational silos act as barriers to transformation.

Moreover, with Gartner reporting that I&O leaders are looking towards Value Stream Management (VSM) to define the future of DevOps and that by 2023, 70% of organizations will use value stream management to improve flow in the DevOps pipeline, the onus is on enterprise technology leaders such as CIOs/CTOs/VPs to be the change-maker for their organization and guide on ways to boost DevOps efficiency and improve delivery efficiency.

The blog highlights how by tracking fundamental DevOps metrics as well as avoiding common barriers to DevOps transformation, technology leaders can improve DevOps efficiency.

#1 Track 4 Key DORA DevOps Metrics For Efficiency

You can’t manage what you can’t measure! According to the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report by DORA, by measuring four key values, and continuously iterating to improve on them, a team can achieve significantly better business outcomes.

Using these metrics as a baseline for your organization’s performance is a great way to improve the DevOps efficiency and effectiveness of your operations. These four metrics help VP of engineering, CTO, CIOs capture the effectiveness of the DevOps process through a focus on speed and stability.

While the metrics such as lead time for change and deployment frequency measure speed, other metrics such as change failure rate and time to restore service shift the emphasis on stability. If you are looking to do a quick baseline of your team’s software delivery performance, use the DORA DevOps Quick Check

Metric #1 Deployment Frequency

Why: Measures how often an enterprise successfully releases new features or capabilities to production.

According to the 2020 DevOps Trend Survey, 75% of enterprises prefer Deployment Frequency to measure DevOps success. Considered by far the most common method of DevOps success, a high deployment frequency is an indicator of an optimized CI pipeline. Mature teams have high deployment frequency since their processes are streamlined and standardized. The metric tracks how often does the enterprise deploys code to production or releases new features to end-users. It usually measures on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It resonates with continuous improvement as frequent updates indicate an IT team highly responsive to the business environment and customer needs

Metric #2 Lead Time For Change

Why: Measures the amount of time it takes a commit to get into production.

This metric gives insight into the DevOps process’s efficiency, complexity, and the team’s ability to meet evolving customer needs. It measures the time it takes for a code change to reach production and helps detect patterns that show complexities in the DevOps process. The metric determines the duration it takes for a change or new feature to go from code (initialization of development cycle) to deployment and production. Short lead times suggest immediate feedback while long lead times indicate inefficiency DevOps process.

Metric #3 Change Failure Rate

Why: Measures the percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.

It is a crucial metric that enterprises must track since failed deployments cause revenue losses and unsatisfied customers. DevOps aims to achieve frequent deployment with the least failure rate and the change failure rate metric measures what percentage of changes to production or releases result in degraded service or failures (such as service outage or unplanned outages) and subsequently required a hotfix, rollback, fix forward or patch. A low change failure rate indicates quick and frequent deployment whereas a high failure rate indicates an unstable DevOps practice and process.

Metric #4 Time to restore service/ Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)

Why: Measures how long it takes an enterprise to recover from a failure in production.

A preferred metric among decision-makers to measure DevOps efficiency, the metric measures how long it usually takes to restore service when an incident or a defect such as an unplanned outage or service impairment that impacts the users, occurs. The mean time to restore service must become lower as DevOps maturity grows. The metric measures the average time it takes to restore a system or service to its original state from the moment an error is identified, thus allows CTO or VP operations to better understand the resilience of the application and DevOps’s team capability in developing a fix and roll out.

# 2 Avoid Common Barriers That Obstruct DevOps Efficiency

So, your DevOps team has embraced DevOps, adopted new tools, and even established new processes but still isn’t making much headway to become a high-performance DevOps machine! According to a survey by Compuware, 97% of application development managers said IT is under more pressure than ever to deliver software innovation faster. According to the 2020 DevOps Trends Survey, 47% of respondents are unsure of how to improve the organization’s DevOps processes. Even as enterprises embrace DevOps to leverage the speed, there exist common barriers and pitfalls which can compromise the efficiency of the DevOps initiative.

  • Not Nurturing A Culture of Collaboration

Even as it may sound cliché, culture remains the cornerstone of increasing DevOps efficiency. Gartner predicts that through 2022, 75% of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations due to issues around organizational learning and change. In fact, collaboration, the ability to solve problems as well as coordination with other teams is an important trait for DevOps teams.

The right culture and right people lead to consistent DevOps success yet DevOps executives and practitioners don’t see eye to eye, thus there is often a missing link between DevOps aspiration and reality of implementation. While practitioners place more emphasis on strong collaboration culture, the decision-makers prefer to value individual capabilities, thus striking the right balance is critical to boosting DevOps efficiency.

  • Failure to Measure DevOps Efficiency

Due to the presence of data silos in an enterprise, it often happens that not everyone is looking at the same picture when it comes to performance. Thus, this is an area that enterprises often fall short of, and therefore it is important to track key DevOps metrics such as those mentioned above to score high DevOps efficiency.

In a recent study on DevOps trends, 50% of the respondents agreed that it is important to measure the impact and efficiency of DevOps, but don’t have a clear way to do so. Even among those that do measure, Three quarters measure DevOps success, most commonly through deployment frequency. Enterprises can also leverage the four key DevOps metrics identified by (DevOps Research and Assessment) DORA. Data is the fuel that drives high DevOps efficiency and DevOps without measurement is a failure. Therefore, proactively monitoring DevOps performance is a staple for high-performance DevOps teams and strongly related to high DevOps efficiency.

  • Speed Is Not Enough, Top Performers Score High On Both Speed And Quality

Faster is not always better! Too often, enterprises set unrealistic expectations and what DevOps can deliver. Delivering faster is simply not enough, delivering business value requires enterprises to deliver both speed and quality. Time to market and quick response to user needs are critical but just a part of the larger puzzle. High-performance DevOps teams don’t trade off quality and security for speed.

Therefore, enterprise leaders must bridge the disconnect and agree on an incremental and iterative approach, objectives as well as metrics to increase DevOps efficiency so it can deliver business value on an ongoing basis. A fully native Salesforce DevOps automation such as Flosum helps remove the process bottlenecks and achieve quality with speed. By automating the entire pipeline, Flosum ensures a smoother, faster deployment that does not compromise quality and security for speed.

10x your Salesforce DevOps Efficiency with Flosum Today!

Deployments are difficult!

But because of how Flosum can automate the deployments, the DevOps team can easily create an automated CI/CD pipeline as well as have complete visibility of all release CI/CD pipelines and the DevOps cycle. As a result, developers can deploy faster, improve their productivity, and drive faster releases.

Interestingly, deployment apart, Flosum’s ability to clone deployment packages in seconds or even roll back in just one click allows Salesforce Developers to correct any errors and expedite deployment.

As the preferred choice for fast, efficient deployments, Flosum is helping Salesforce developers, admins, and architects accelerate deployments, release faster, and deliver more value. With Flosum, we make deployments fast, easy, and hassle-free.

Shorten your release and deployment cycle with Flosum today!

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