DevOps Metric: Amount of Defects and Issues: definition.

  • Important to: VP of QA, Operations
  • Definition: How many bugs or tickets are found in production/ how many recurring bugs in production. As well as - how many deployment issues during release are encountered.
  • How to measure: tickets from customers, support records. For deployment issues: post release retrospectives.
  • Expected Outcome: Amount of deployment issues, defects and recurring defects should decrease as DevOps maturity grows.

Many organizations make an almost-conscious choice: go fast, or build with high quality. Usually they lose on both ends.

Measuring defects and deployment issues is a good measure for a DevOps maturity model. You should become faster while not compromising on quality, because quality gates are fully automated in the form of tests in multiple steps, instead of manual error prone steps.

The same applies for error prone deployments: they almost stop happening, and when they do happen, the deployment script itself is fixed and can be tested before being used to deploy to production. Just like regular software development life cycles. The ROI is huge.