DevOps and Maturity, a clash?

Okay, so you have decided that DevOps is not only tooling but also a mindset. So you want to change the mindset of people.

And then, where do you start, what do you focus on…. That is then the ultimate question. And people that know me, know that I will state with a quote from someone I worked for: “ First crawl, then walk and then run.” Which will result in a discussion about maturity models, and this might be a contradiction with self-organizing teams. So I expected to find nothing on this matter on the internet.

But there is a post, so there will be information that we can use. We do agree that DevOps relies heavily on agile practices, so we might fist take a look at the agile and see if there is a model available.

For Agile I have found the Sidky Agile Measurment Index (SAMI), this model will help Agile teams to focus on the right things. More information can be found here. 

And this is a good start, but a lot of companies want to scale agile, and a lot of companies are using SAFe for this. And are then also requesting more guidelines on how to implement and mature in this approach. For this I found a research paper from the Technical University of Eindhoven that describes the creation of a maturity model of SAFe, which can be found here. And detailed information on the different maturity stages and the focus areas can be found here.

Okay that is nice, but those items are focused on agile, while DevOps is more than agile. DevOps is a combination of Development and Ops, and for both are already maturity models developed and tested. We do have CMMI for Services and CMMI for Development. And the ultimate question is can we combine this models to support the DevOps organization. That task has been done by for instance Arun Gupta.

And not only Arun walked this route, there is also a scientific paper on this topic that can be here.

I hope this information will help you in taking the next steps on your DevOps journey.