Gap Assessment for DevOps

Gap Survey, Assessment and Analysis
For
DevOps
How to identify and analyze Gaps in DevOps practices.
Gap Assessment - DevOps Copyright © 2021 by Marc Hornbeek All rights reserved.

WHY?
Gap analysis provides valuable
inputs for formulating a strategy
and roadmap to improve a topic.
2
• Gap Survey is discovery tool used to collect
information about the current state of
practices for a topic.
• Gap Assessment is a process to determine
differences (Gaps) between current practices
and recommended practices for a topic.
• Gap Assessment Workshop is a meeting in
which the Gap Assessment is validated prior
to Gap Analysis.
• Gap Analysis is the process of determining
priorities for reducing Gaps found during a
Gap Assessment.
• Gap Assessment Tool is software that helps
perform Gap Surveys, Gap Assessments and
Gap Analysis.
www.engineeringdevops.com
http://mybook.to/engineeringdevops
Gap Assessment Copyright © 2021 by Marc Hornbeek All rights reserved.

3
1. Pick a
Topic that
you want to
analyze.
3. Enter practices
into the
Gap Assessment
Tool.
4. Determine
who needs to
be surveyed.
5. Gap
Survey
Collect data
with Survey
6.
Perform Gap
Assessment
7.
Perform
Gap
Analysis
2. Determine
Practices for
the Topic.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Gap Assessment Copyright © 2021 by Marc Hornbeek All rights reserved.

• DevOps offers efficient and safe delivery software with DevOps value
streams, when best practices are followed.
• To get the value from DevOps it is important to use recommended
practices, inclusive of people, process and technologies.
• A Gap Assessment is a great way to efficiently evaluate an organization’s
practices for DevOps and determine a strategy for improvement.
• The 9 Pillars Gap Assessment Tool greatly speeds up the Gap Survey, Gap
Assessment and Gap Analysis process.
• What follow is an example of the Gap Assessment tool being used for the
topic “DevOps” for an organization.
Step 1: Pick a Topic
Gap Assessment for DevOps
Gap Assessment – DevOps Copyright © 2021 by Marc Hornbeek All rights reserved.

The 9 practice category pillars
are:
• Leadership
• Collaborative Culture
• Design for DevOps
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Testing
• Continuous Monitoring
• Elastic Infrastructure
• Continuous Delivery
• Continuous Security
Step 2: Determine Practices
for DevOps Gap Assessment
For an example DevOps assessment, I
used the practices under 9 practices
categories described in a blog that I
co-authored called “9 Pillars of
DevOps Best Practices” .
https://devops.com/nine-pillars-of-devops-best-practices/

Step 3: Enter DevOps Practices Into the
Gap Assessment Tool.
A Gap Assessment Tool, pre-
loaded with a sample of
DevOps practices in a file called
“DevOps Assessment” can be
downloaded for free from one
of the resource pages found on
www.engineeringdevops.com
Edit the practices categories
and add/delete practices
from each category if you
prefer to make changes.

Step 4: Determine who needs to provide input.
• Business leaders – because they influence culture and budgets for DevOps.
• Developers – because they need to design in accordance with DevOps practices.
• Project owners – because they influence product work priorities.
• QA testers - because they need to test in accordance with DevOps practices.
• Ops - because DevOps practices affect operations.
• Security – because DevOps affect security practices.
For the Gap Analysis to be comprehensive, people in roles that are affected by
container practices need to be surveyed, or at least represented to ensure their
perspectives are included. The following are example roles that typically are included.
The survey can be conducted for an individual application, a group of applications, or
all the applications in the enterprise. However, it is important that the Gap
Assessment and Gap Analysis be performed on the organization segment that is being
targeted for improvement.

Step 5: Gap Survey
A Gap Survey should allow each surveyed person to enter an “Importance Level”
score, a “Practice Level” score and Comments. These are all essential for the Gap
Assessment and Gap Analysis.
DevOps Practices GAP Assessment Survey
(I)
Importance
(P)
Practice Level Comments
Practices Description
How important is this practice to the
organization?
0=Not Relevant
1=Not Important
2=Nice to Have
3=Important
4=Very Important
5=Critical
To what extent does the organization
practice this?
0=Not Sure
1=Rarely, if ever
2= Sometimes
3=Most of the Time
4=Always
5=We are really good at this
Enter any comments that are
relevant to qualify or explain the
scores entered for each practice.
Leadership (Lead)
Leaders demonstrate a long-term vision for organizational direction, and team direction.
Leaders intellectually stimulate the team status quo by encouraging asking new questions
and question the basic assumptions about the work.
Leaders provide inspirational communication that inspires pride in being part of the
team, says positive things about the team, inspires passion and motivation and
encourages people to see that change brings opportunities.
Leaders demonstrate supportive style by considering others’ personal feelings before
acting, being thoughtful of others’ personal needs and caring about individuals’ interests.

Step 6: Gap Assessment
The Gap Assessment process requires all the practices scores collected from the
surveys to be collected and assembled to calculate an aggregate set of scores. Gap
scores are calculated using a formula that weights each Practice Level score with the
corresponding Important Level score. A visual representation helps to identify
practices areas and individual practices that have the highest, most important Gaps.
DevOps Practices GAP
Summary
(I)
Importance
(P)
Practice Level
(G)
GAP
RANK
Leadership practices (Lead) 5.0 2.2 9.0 1
Collaborative Culture practices (CC) 4.1 2.1 7.9 4
Design For DevOps (DFD) 4.0 2.3 6.4 8
Continuous Integration practices (CI) 4.5 3.2 7.0 6
Continuous Testing practices (CT) 3.9 2.0 8.0 3
Continuous Monitoring practices (CM) 4.1 2.6 7.2 5
Elastric Infrastructure practices (EI) 3.6 2.3 9.0 1
Continuous Delivery / Deployment practices (CD) 4.1 2.7 6.7 7
Continuous Security practices (CS) 4.3 3.1 5.3 9
Overall Assessment (Average) 4.2 2.5 7.4
Importance Practice Level GAP

Step 6b: Gap Assessment Workshop
No matter how well written the practices and score definitions are, it is not
unusual for some people to misunderstand and to enter scores that they would
not have otherwise.
For this reason, it is important to ensure that the data collected is validated before
conducting the Gap Analysis.
The preferred approach is to conduct a Gap Assessment Workshop with key
representatives from each role that participated in the survey.
During the workshop, the scores for each practice that have a high deviation
between survey responses are discussed and if necessary adjusted.

Step 7: Gap Analysis
The Gap Analysis indicates where solution strategies and implementation roadmaps
need to be focused to reduce the most important gaps.
The Gap Analysis process involves extracting the high GAP practices and tagging and
ranking each of them against solution categories that are determined by experts.
DevOps Practices GAP Analysis
(I)
Importance
(P)
Practice Level
(G)
GAP
Leadership
&
Culture
Deployment
Design
CI
Test
Project
Managemnt
DR
Security
Monitoring
7 6 4 4 3 3 2 1 1
The culture encourages learning from failures and co-operation between
departments.
5 1 15 1 1 1 1
Leaders intellectually stimulate the team status quo by encouraging asking new
questions and question the basic assumptions about the work. 5 2 10
1
Leaders provide inspirational communication that inspires pride in being part of the
team, says positive things about the team, inspires passion and motivation and
encourages people to see that change brings opportunities.
5 2 10
1
Leaders demonstrate supportive style by considering others’ personal feelings before
acting, being thoughtful of others’ personal needs and caring about individuals’
interests.
5 2 10
1
Leaders promote personal recognition by commending teams for better-than-average
work, acknowledging improvements in the quality of work and personally compliment
individuals’ outstanding work.
5 2 10
1
The culture encourages cross-functional collaboration, shared responsibilities and
avoids silos between Dev, Ops and QA. 5 2 10
1
Communication flows fluidly across the end-to-end cross-functional team using
collaboration tools where appropriate (E.g., SLACK, HipChat, Yammer, etc.). 4 2 8
1
Automated tools are used to support immutable infrastructure deployments. 4 1 12 1

Marc Hornbeek
a.k.a. DevOps_the_Gray esq.
CEO and Principal Consultant
Engineering DevOps Consulting
Author – Engineering DevOps
mhornbeek@engineeringdevops.com
Learn More

Gap Assessment for DevOps

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Gap Assessment for DevOps (20)

More from Marc Hornbeek (18)

Recently uploaded (20)

Gap Assessment for DevOps