How to Unleash the Data in your DevOps Tools to Drive Continuous Improvement
Where are the weak spots in your software delivery chain? How are they affecting the value of the applications your company delivers? If you can’t answer these questions, you may be limiting revenue opportunities for your organization.
That’s because for most companies today, software delivery is the key source from which their value stream flows. So, continuously improving the end-to-end delivery process must be IT’s number one priority. The question is where do you start?
Maturity Models for Continuous Improvement
A quick Google search on “Agile Maturity Model” yields lots of results for how to drive continuous improvement. Some of them are based on educated guesses (but guesses nonetheless). The better ones are founded on questionnaires from a sampling of organizations, but rarely are they based on real data. These models will offer some insight in how to drive continuous improvement of your software process, but their effectiveness is limited, mainly because they’re not specific to your organization. For that you need real data about your own delivery process.
The good news is, if you’ve entered the era of continuous integration, deployment, and delivery, the data is probably already at your fingertips. You just need to know how to unleash it.
Making the Most of Your Tools
There are many widely-used tools that will help you in your journey towards a data-driven approach to continuous improvement. These tools contain charts, reports, and dashboards that can give you insight in parts of your process. For example, ServiceNow, VersionOne, and Jira provide a burndown chart, which you can use to do things like:
- See the status of work in progress
- Determine whether you’re on track to deliver what you promised
- Estimate date of project completion
- View the number of stories in the sprint stable and the same during the sprint
Read the full story at Xebialabs.com.
