Beyond the Four Key Metrics: Quantifying DevOps Practice

Abstract

This project extends the standardized methods of managing software delivery, to ensure developers are provided with meaningful in-depth feedback on their practices. The problem with the standardized metrics is that they are too broad and do not consider the wide-ranging statistics that GitLab repositories have to offer. Some repository statistics such as milestones, pipelines, and epics, to name a few, are presently unexamined by management features such as GitLab's 'Value Stream Analytics'. This project provides richer statistics that should be analyzed when the software delivery process is being managed, which will also enhance and give guidance to how features such as 'Value Stream Analytics' can be extended. This project follows the structure of ‘Process Mining’ streamlining the process of collecting source workflows, comparing them against the model workflows, to perform discovery methods to understand how to improve the model workflows. This allows the chance of introducing important statistics which are pivotal for measuring DevOps performance - through taking source workflows and judging their performance against the existing DevOps metrics, along with additional analytics that should be considered when measuring productivity in a DevOps environment.