Embracing the concept of Atlassian DevOps for better, quicker, cost-effective application delivery is commendable. However, unless you track or monitor your progress, you can never be too sure if your efforts are resulting in the outcomes that you expect (and deserve). You might be bridging the gaps between your development and operations teams, you might be giving them the tools they need to efficiently do their jobs, and you might also be building a culture of continuous everything. But knowing how successful (or unsuccessful) your efforts are and how happy your customers are as a result of your efforts requires you to focus on DevOps metrics.

The importance of DevOps metrics

As good customer experience continues to be the most important aspect for business success, DevOps, through the unification of development and operations tools and best practices, ensures the continuous integration, testing, and delivery of applications. But to measure the true value of Jira DevOps, it is important to know if your efforts are paying the right dividends.

DevOps metrics allow for the continuous monitoring and assessment of the efforts of different team members, providing real-time insight into how the project is progressing towards success. There are several reasons why DevOps metrics are important:

•       To build a culture of continuous improvement, so teams constantly strive towards making small but frequent improvements in every task
•       To track deployments over time and understand why deployments are not successful or how they can be improved
•       To understand mean time to resolve incidents, so steps can be taken to reduce their impact and stakeholders can be informed in time
•       To verify the success rate of changes that are made over time and take immediate action if and when something goes wrong
•       To understand incident trends over a period, so teams can make necessary changes to reduce the rate of incidents and also be better prepared to tackle them
•       To gauge service health via a single pane, getting much-needed insights into the status of the DevOps value stream

DevOps metrics that Jira provides and the relevance of each of these

To evaluate how your Jira DevOps efforts are faring, Jira offers several metrics that help you gauge the success of DevOps: right from what bottlenecks you’re facing to what’s causing a snail’s pace, delivery speed and more. By paving the way for continuous value stream mapping, these Jira metrics ensure that the application you build works towards continuous improvements to the customer experience.

Here’s looking at the top four DevOps metrics that Jira provides and the relevance of each of these:

1.     Lead time for changes: To measure the average time it takes for a change to go from idea to implementation, Jira’s lead time for changes metric is an effective way for evaluating workflow and productivity. Although ideally, the agile methodologies associated with DevOps should enable a short turnaround time for changes, this metric provides you with real-world insight into the time it takes for changes to actually be made – allowing you to keep up with customer needs and make the most of emerging trends. Based on this insight, you can gauge how adaptive and capable your team is in addressing feedback and take steps to further improve productivity.
2.     Change failure rate: Although Jira DevOps allows for changes to be made quickly and easily, Jira’s change failure metric acts as the indicator of the success of these changes. Using this metric, teams can assess the failure rate of changes, and plan on how to reduce this rate while improving agility, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Higher change failure rates might require teams to work on developing long-term solutions for common issues.
3.     Deployment frequency: Delivering feature updates, changes, and improvements with speed and efficiency is one of the cornerstones of any Jira DevOps organization. The deployment frequency metric by Jira helps teams in assessing the speed of their deployments – while helping build and maintain a competitive advantage. Since higher deployment frequency means greater agility and ability to keep pace with changing needs, measuring deployment frequency on a periodic basis helps determine which deployments were successful and which are still in need of improvement.
4.     Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): When it comes to monitoring DevOps success, MTTR is a key performance indicator that evaluates your ability to resolve issues. By measuring the average time it takes for issues to recover, this Jira metric unearths insight on the how, what, and why of issues, providing answers to key questions including how customers lost connection, what errors they experienced, or why they abandoned the application.
5.   Change Volume : The metrics for deployment frequency can be misleading if you’re not also measuring the volume of change between deployments. Tracking the amount of change with each deployment allows for a more accurate representation of progress.

With the global DevOps market expected to be worth $23.3 billion by 2027, there is enough evidence to prove the surge in DevOps Jira adoption. But while organizations big and small are embracing this popular concept to improve application delivery quality, speed, and agility, there is also a pressing need to evaluate how well the efforts are reaping benefits. Jira’s DevOps metrics provide a single pane of truth across the application delivery lifecycle, allowing teams to collect and view critical DevOps data including lead time for changes, change failure rate, deployment frequency, and MTTR. It helps them improve development efficiency, customer satisfaction, and business revenue.