Measuring DevOps Maturity: Assessing Progress and Setting Goals for Improvement

I’ve been working in DevOps for over a decade, and one question comes up constantly: “How do we know if we’re actually good at this?” It’s a fair question. Plenty of companies think they’re doing DevOps because they use Jenkins and have a Slack channel called #devops. But that’s not really DevOps.

Real DevOps maturity is messier and more complex than most frameworks suggest. It’s about people, processes, and tools working together – and measuring that isn’t straightforward.

Most DevOps maturity models were created by consultants who needed neat categories to sell services. The reality is that organizations are all over the place. You might have amazing automation but terrible collaboration. Or great culture but manual deployments.

I’ve seen companies with sophisticated CI/CD pipelines where developers and operations teams still barely talk to each other. I’ve also seen places with simple toolchains but incredible collaboration that delivers better results than the fancy shops.

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) gets referenced a lot – Initial, Managed, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, and Optimizing. It’s useful as a rough guide, but don’t get too hung up on which “level” you’re at. Focus on whether you’re actually delivering better software faster.

After working with dozens of organizations, here’s what I’ve found actually matters:

Not a major feature – just a one-line bug fix. If it takes more than a day from commit to production, you’ve got room for improvement. I’ve seen places where this takes weeks because of bureaucratic approval processes.

Daily is good. Multiple times per day is better, assuming you’re not breaking things. But I’ve worked places that deployed monthly and were perfectly fine because they had rock-solid testing. Context matters.

This is where you see the difference between mature and immature organizations. Mature ones have runbooks, monitoring, and everyone knows their role. Immature ones have people running around in circles.

But be careful here – automation for automation’s sake is wasteful. I’ve seen over-engineered systems that automated everything and became impossible to debug when they broke.

Manual testing is expensive and slow. But automated tests that don’t catch real bugs are just as wasteful. Quality matters more than coverage percentages.

Infrastructure as Code isn’t just a best practice – it’s essential for consistency and scale. But I’ve seen teams get so caught up in perfect IaC that they stopped shipping features.

This is the hardest one to measure but probably the most important. Do developers understand operational concerns? Do operations people contribute to architectural decisions? Or do they just throw things over the wall?

Most maturity frameworks are overcomplicated, but a few are actually useful:

CAMS (Culture, Automation, Measurement, Sharing) is simple enough to remember and covers the important stuff. Culture comes first because without it, the rest doesn’t matter.

Microsoft’s DevOps Maturity Model is practical if you can ignore the Microsoft-specific parts. It gives you concrete capabilities to work toward rather than abstract levels.

The DevOps Capability Assessment Model (DCAM) is comprehensive but can be overwhelming. Use it if you need detailed assessment criteria, skip it if you want something actionable quickly.

I generally avoid Gartner’s models because they’re designed more for selling research than helping practitioners.

Here’s how I approach DevOps maturity assessments:

• Talk to the people doing the work. Surveys are fine, but conversations reveal the real story. Ask developers about their biggest frustrations. Ask operations people what keeps them up at night. Ask product managers what they wish engineering could do differently.
• Look at your data. Your tools are already collecting most of what you need to know. Check your version control for commit frequency and change size. Look at your CI/CD system for build times and failure rates. Review your monitoring for deployment success rates and recovery times.
• Shadow some deployments. Nothing reveals process problems like watching an actual deployment. How many people are involved? How much manual work happens? What could go wrong?
• Map your value stream. Follow a feature from idea to production. Where does it get stuck? Who has to approve what? How much time is spent waiting versus working?
• Set specific goals. “Improve DevOps” isn’t a goal. “Reduce lead time from 5 days to 2 days” is a goal. “Increase deployment frequency from weekly to daily” is a goal.
• Measure continuously. Don’t make this a yearly exercise. Check your key metrics monthly. Do quarterly retrospectives on what’s working and what isn’t.

I worked with a fintech startup that was convinced they had great DevOps. They had all the tools – Kubernetes, GitLab CI, comprehensive monitoring. Their deployment frequency was impressive – sometimes multiple times per day.

But when I dug deeper, things weren’t so rosy. Their lead time for changes was terrible because they had a complex approval process. Their change failure rate was high because they were moving fast but not being careful. When things broke, it took hours to figure out what went wrong.

We spent three months focusing on three things: simplifying their approval process, improving their testing, and creating better incident response procedures. Their tools stayed mostly the same, but their outcomes improved dramatically.

The lesson? Tools don’t make you mature. Processes and people do.

After seeing this stuff succeed and fail across dozens of organizations, here’s what I think actually indicates DevOps maturity:

• Your developers can deploy their own code safely. Not just push to a staging environment – actually deploy to production without involving operations for routine changes.
• You find out about problems from your monitoring, not your customers. And when you do find problems, you can trace them back to specific changes quickly.
• Your incident response is boring. Everyone knows what to do. The runbooks work. People don’t panic.
• You make decisions based on data, not politics. When something goes wrong, you look at metrics and logs, not blame people.
• Your teams share responsibility for uptime. It’s not just operations’ job to keep things running – everyone cares about production.
• You can experiment safely. Feature flags, canary deployments, rollback procedures – you have multiple ways to try new things without breaking everything.

DevOps maturity isn’t about checking boxes or reaching some arbitrary level in a model. It’s about delivering better software more reliably with less stress.

Most organizations I work with are somewhere in the middle – they’ve got some things figured out and others that need work. That’s normal. The key is being honest about where you are and picking the most impactful things to improve next.

Don’t try to fix everything at once. Pick one or two metrics that matter to your business, set realistic targets, and work toward them systematically. Then repeat the process.

The best DevOps organizations I know treat maturity assessment as an ongoing conversation, not a report card. They’re always asking “How can we do this better?” and actually listening to the answers.