Chapter 1: Problem Statement
Reflecting on my first six weeks at Harness, I have already learned a lot about the issues that software engineering teams face in today’s diverse, demanding, and accelerating world of DevOps. Organizations large and small are facing incredible challenges in understanding the efficiency and effectiveness of their teams.
My experiences with hundreds of software teams within Fortune 500 companies, as well as mid-sized businesses over the last few years, have shown me that there are many ways in which DevOps is implemented. With an ever-increasing number of tools being utilized within the DevOps toolchain which now include security and compliance tools along with a magnitude of different configurations, expectations, and results, this problem can seem insurmountable.
This problem is compounded within larger organizations where work can be highly distributed, resources are shuffled between multiple work efforts and agile methods can vary from team to team.
In previous years, some organizations have tried to implement measures around this highly complex ecosystem. Many organizations ended up trying to measure everything including the kitchen sink, with the end result being a lack of a single set of clear software metrics which transcends multiple teams and organizations.
In these first few weeks with Harness, my interactions with software engineering leaders have emphasized the significance of this challenge. But leaders are now focused on how to effectively implement industry-standard development metrics instead of the all-you-can-eat methods of the past.
This has culminated in the following question that is being asked by almost every organization that I speak with: “How are other companies measuring success in their software engineering teams?”
The answer is going to vary depending on the maturity of a given DevOps organization. At Harness, we believe that a phased approach makes the most sense. During this blog series, we will drill down on one potential maturity path for Engineering Excellence. This path contains five phases that will move an organization toward engineering success. We will be exploring each of these phases in-depth during this blog series:
- Implement DORA metrics
- More holistic software metrics
- Organizational rollouts
- Actionability via alerts and automated processes
- Benchmarking
Utilizing a platform such as the Harness Software Engineering Insights can provide support for the diverse DevOps toolsets along with the flexibility to adapt, combine and formulate analytics appropriate to each given audience. Harness offers out-of-the-box dashboards for standardized software metrics such as DORA, and it also provides the flexibility and adaptability to not only visualize the metrics required in your organizations but also provide predictive analytics and orchestration to take action upon those analytics.
Check out a live demo of how we can help you transform your engineering organization!
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