🔌 Plug into Jira: Driving continuous improvement through DORA metrics
In the Plug into Jira series, we’ve talked about a number of integrations that unlock new capabilities within Jira Software Cloud. This includes CI/CD, Confluence, feature flags, security, and test management.
Today we’re looking at how to use these integrations to drive continuous improvement. By plugging your tools into Jira you gain visibility into your software development lifecycle. Jira Software captures not only how you plan work but how that work moves across tools. This enables you to look at the health of your processes and identify ways to improve. Read on to get started.
Accelerate deployment frequency
Every time you deliver value to your customers is an opportunity to get closer to them. And this does not require monumental updates, you can learn from incremental changes. Observing how different customer segments adopt and use new capabilities informs you of their preferences. The more often you deploy to customers, the more frequent the feedback, which gives you an upper hand in building your next feature.
Deployment frequency is influenced by batch size and speed. However, pushing the same batch size through processes faster can erode quality. Focusing on minimizing batch size allows you to improve quality, and reduce risk. As your process improves to support smaller batch sizes, you will increase speed. You can find the detailed deployment frequency in the Reports tab with deployment frequency and batch size.
Improve pipeline efficiency
Cycle time is first commit until the code is shipped. This part of the software development process is a great area to drive improvements. You look for friction in the process, maybe a code review or a test and then experiment to improve. As your delivery process matures your cycle time will go down. You want to identify outliers in your cycle times as it will be easiest to identify friction points that cause significant delays. You can find the detailed cycle time in the Reports tab.
How to use metrics for continuous improvement
A lot goes into software development and basically none of it is simple. Metrics in DevOps help us to make sense out of a complex system. Both deployment frequency and cycle time look at the throughput of your software development process. And to improve throughput, a lot has to change. Metrics help teams identify opportunities for self-improvement. The metrics themselves will not fix anything. You have to use your metrics to guide experimentation to improve how you do your daily work.
That’s why we’ve put both deployment frequency and cycle time within the Deployments tab insights panel. These insights surface trends in your DORA metrics so that you can understand the health of your software delivery system while you analyze your deployment data.
How do you use metrics to guide improvement?
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Scott White
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