Hello and welcome to project metrics and KPIs. When putting together a project, the goals need to be specific and measurable, and they need to be defined at the outset of the project. Establishing measurable goals means that appropriate metrics and key performance indicators, or KPIs, need to be established and agreed upon.

Over the next several minutes we are going to take a look at some of the more commonly used metrics and KPIs as they relate to DevOps projects. We will review metrics and KPIs that provide faster outcomes, improve efficiency, ensure quality and security, and ensure a positive culture.

Some metrics and KPIs that can help produce faster outcomes for many DevOps projects include deployment frequency, deployment speed, and deployment size. Deployment frequency is important because the frequency of deployments is usually a critical driver in most DevOps projects. Deployment speed is also just as important, because DevOps projects benefit when you decrease the time it takes for deployments. Deployment size refers to the number of features, stories, and bug fixes that are deployed each time. This is also a key metric to track. 

Efficiency can be improved by increasing the server to admin ratio, which refers to the number of administrators that are required for the number of servers that are necessary. Likewise, the staff member to customers ratio should also be kept at a minimum. This metric refers to the number of staff members that are necessary to serve a specific number of customers. Application usage and performance are two other key metrics to consider when trying to improve efficiency. While application usage refers to how busy an application is, application performance refers to how well the application is running, based on application metrics.

There are many different metrics and KPIs that should be tracked to ensure quality and security. For example, you should keep track of how often your deployments or applications fail. This metric is referred to as deployment failure rate. Application failure rates should also be tracked so that you know how often your application is experiencing configuration failures and performance timeouts. And while we are talking about failure rates, let's not forget about mean time to recover. You should be paying attention to mean time to recover. Because this metric indicates how quickly you are able to recover from your failures.

Because it's never a good thing when your customers double as bug testers, you need to be keeping track of bug report rates as well. You should always know how many bugs your customers are finding and whether they are increasing or decreasing.

Last but not least, availability metrics and SLA metrics are critical as well. By tracking availability, you can see what percentage of time your application is actually available for your customers. By tracking availability, you can measure against your service level agreements.

To ensure a positive culture in your organization, you need to keep employee morale and retention rates in mind. While employee morale can be difficult to measure, it's important to understand if your employees are happy with where the organization is and where it's heading, this is because it directly affects retention rates which of course you should also be monitoring. If your organization is losing staff, you need to find out why.

While these metrics that we just reviewed are the most common, what you really should be doing is tracking metrics that focus on the outcomes that you are trying to achieve. These metrics and KPIs will vary from project to project, and from organization to organization.

Lectures

• Course Introduction
• Mentoring Team Members on Agile Practices
• In-Team and Cross-Team Collaboration
• Tools and Processes for Agile Practices
• Creating Organizational Structures for Agile Practices
• Conclusion