Key takeaways on DevOps assessment:

• A DevOps Assessment is a comprehensive evaluation of an organisation’s current DevOps practices, tools, culture, and processes. It aims to identify strengths and pinpoint areas for improvement, providing an actionable strategy to enhance workflow efficiency and collaboration between development and operations teams.
• The assessment typically examines several critical areas, including: automation, CI/CD, team collaboration, observability, Infrastructure as Code, systems availability and disaster recovery.
• By understanding their DevOps maturity level, organisations can uncover bottlenecks, clarify inefficiencies, and develop a clear roadmap for improvement. This leads to enhanced workflow efficiency, better collaboration between development and operations teams, and drives overall productivity.

What is a DevOps Assessment and how it could benefit your business?

A DevOps Assessment is a comprehensive evaluation of an organisation’s current DevOps practices, tools, culture, and processes. By examining these areas, businesses can identify their strengths and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

Such an assessment helps organisations understand their DevOps maturity level, uncover bottlenecks, and clarify where inefficiencies or collaboration challenges exist.

The outcome is an actionable strategy that enhances workflow efficiency, fosters better dev and ops teams collaboration, and drives overall productivity, setting the stage for a successful transformation and long-term growth.

What areas are typically evaluated during a DevOps Assessment?

A DevOps Assessment looks beyond tools and processes. It examines how key DevOps practices contribute to faster delivery, higher system reliability, and better alignment between IT and business goals of an organisation.

The areas typically assessed include:

• DevOps Automation – evaluating the level of automation across development, testing, and deployment processes to reduce manual effort, increase reliability, and support faster delivery cycles.
• Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) – reviewing pipeline structure, frequency of deployments, automation quality, and release reliability to ensure that code moves smoothly and safely from development to production.
• Team collaboration – analysing how development, operations, QA, and other roles interact to foster clear communication, break down silos, and align day-to-day activities with shared goals.
• Cultural alignment – assessing whether the organisational culture supports ownership, transparency, trust, and continuous improvement.
• Observability – examining how logs, metrics, and monitoring tools are used to provide real-time visibility into system performance, support root cause analysis, and enable quick, proactive incident resolution.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – reviewing infrastructure management practices, especially the adoption and maturity of IaC. This includes how infrastructure changes are tracked, tested, and deployed, ensuring repeatability, scalability, and auditability.
• Systems availability and disaster recovery – evaluating the organisation’s resilience strategies, including uptime management, failure handling, and recovery procedures, to ensure business continuity and minimise service disruptions.

Together, these areas help uncover where DevOps practices are effectively supporting business goals – and where targeted improvements can deliver higher performance, more predictable releases, and a stronger foundation for growth.

How does a DevOps Assessment work?

A DevOps Assessment typically combines surveys, interviews, process reviews, and tool analysis to evaluate an organisation’s current practices.

Surveys and interviews with key stakeholders – development and operations teams and leadership – provide valuable insights into existing challenges, pain points, and perceptions of the DevOps culture.

Process reviews focus on evaluating the efficiency of current workflows, including code development, testing, deployment, and monitoring, identifying any bottlenecks or inefficiencies.

A thorough analysis of the tools in use, such as version control, CI/CD pipelines, and observability platforms, highlights gaps in functionality or integration that may be hindering performance.

By combining these methods, the assessment identifies opportunities to streamline operations, improve collaboration, and enhance DevOps maturity.

At Future Processing, we focus on detecting inefficiencies and providing clients with clear recommendations on how to address them. Ideologically, we align with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and focus on four key metrics: Deployment Frequency (DF), Lead Time to Deploy (LT), Mean Time to Restore Service (MTTR), and Change Failure Rate (CFR).

As part of the assessment, we establish these indicators for the organisation based on interviews, since they cannot be precisely measured within the scope of the assessment itself. These metrics serve as benchmarks for DevOps maturity, and the final report outlines specific actions needed to improve it.

Read more about our DevOps expertise:

• BizDevOps revolution: blurring the lines between business, dev, and ops
• Top 10 DevOps security best practices
• DevOps transformation: an ultimate guide for businesses

How to conduct a DevOps Assessment?

Conducting a DevOps Assessment involves several key steps:

Gather data

Collect feedback from stakeholders through surveys, interviews, and workshops. Focus on data around processes, tools, culture, and practices.

Analyse current practices

Identify gaps, inefficiencies, and areas requiring improvement, such as automation or communication.

Assess tooling and technology

Review the tools in use across the DevOps practices to assess integration, scalability, and effectiveness.

Identify strengths and weaknesses

Based on the analysis, identify key strengths and weaknesses across various areas, helping to prioritise immediate and long-term improvement.

Develop an action plan for changes

Create a clear, actionable plan for introducing necessary changes and improvements.

Who should participate in a DevOps Assessment?

A DevOps Assessment requires input from a range of stakeholders to ensure a comprehensive view of the organisation’s current practices.

Participants typically include:

• DevOps engineers directly involved in automation and deployment processes.
• Developers providing insights into software development and integration.
• Operations teams managing infrastructure and environments.
• QA specialists assessing testing and quality assurance practices.
• Leadership offering strategic perspectives on organisational goals and culture.

Including a diverse group ensures that all aspects of the DevOps – technical, operational, and cultural – are adequately represented.

What role does leadership play in a DevOps Assessment?

Leadership plays a pivotal role by setting the strategic direction, prioritising initiatives, and ensuring that DevOps practices align with business objectives.

Senior leaders help define the scope, allocate resources for necessary changes, and communicate the transformation’s vision. Their involvement ensures that the DevOps culture and continuous learning are embraced at all levels and that organisational resistance is addressed.

Leadership’s commitment is crucial for driving change, securing buy-in from teams, and fostering a continuous improvement mindset throughout the DevOps journey.

How long does a DevOps Assessment take and how much does it cost?

The duration and cost of a DevOps Assessment depend on factors like the organisation’s size, complexity, and scope of the evaluation.

DevOps Assessment as a standard service is however designed to take three weeks in total, including about one week dedicated to meetings and the rest of time dedicated to preparation, analysis of data and production of the final report.

Its standard cost is 9.500 USD, but we are always open for customised approaches.

How can organisations implement recommendations from a DevOps Assessment?

Implementing recommendations from a DevOps Assessment requires a systematic approach aligned with the organisation’s capabilities and goals.

Start by prioritising recommendations based on their potential impact and feasibility. Breaking down larger initiatives into manageable phases ensures sustainable improvements.

By creating a roadmap with clear priorities, timelines, and resource allocation, organisations can focus on improving DevOps practices step by step. Ownership of each action item ensures accountability and progress.

Successful implementation also requires continuous integration and monitoring. As changes are introduced, teams should track progress, evaluate the effectiveness of new tools and practices, and gather feedback for further improvements.

Leadership plays a vital role in providing resources, fostering cultural change, and encouraging experimentation. By adopting an incremental and iterative approach, organisations can implement DevOps processes and create a foundation for lasting success.

Ready to transform your organisation with DevOps practices?

Reach out to our experts and take the first step towards more efficient, collaborative, and high-performing teams.

The DevOps journey of continuous improvement begins with a clear assessment – let’s build a stronger DevOps foundation together!