How to assess your organization's DevOps maturity?

Assessing DevOps maturity is not about ticking off a list of tools in use, CI/CD, containers, cloud. It means observing concrete practices: how often the organization deploys to production, how long it takes to restore a service after an incident, the share of deployments that fail.

The pillars to assess

Pillar	What to observe
Continuous integration (CI)	Are tests run automatically on every code change?
Continuous deployment (CD)	Is production deployment automated and reproducible?
Infrastructure as Code	Is infrastructure described as versioned code, or does it rely on manual configuration?
Monitoring and observability	Are incidents detected automatically, before a customer reports them?
Incident management	Is there a formalized incident response and post-mortem process?

The four DORA metrics

Deployment frequency: how often does the organization deploy to production?
Lead time for changes: how long between a commit and its deployment to production?
Change failure rate: what proportion of deployments causes an incident?
Mean time to restore (MTTR): how long to restore service after an incident?

These four metrics, popularized by the annual studies of the DORA program (DevOps Research and Assessment, acquired by Google in 2018), allow a comparison of DevOps maturity between organizations, independent of the tools used. They have a blind spot, though: they measure the speed and reliability of delivery, not the value of the features shipped or end user satisfaction.

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Maturity levels observed in practice

Manual, infrequent deployments, with a high risk of human error.
Partial continuous integration: tests are automated, but deployment remains manual.
Continuous deployment on part of the scope, with infrastructure still partly manual.
Widespread continuous deployment, infrastructure as code, proactive monitoring, and MTTR measured in minutes rather than hours.

For an SME, the goal is not necessarily to reach the most advanced level overnight. It starts with identifying the missing practices that weigh most heavily on deployment reliability, then addressing them in that order rather than chasing a theoretical DevOps compliance out of proportion with the team's size.