Data helps organizations make a number of important decisions, every day. It can be used to measure ROI of marketing campaigns and even aggregate user habits. It can also be used to better your DevOps team.
In a Power Talk with SD Times, Steve Boone, DevOps head of product management at HCL Software, and Bryant Schuck, Accelerate product manager at HCL Software, explained how DevOps teams can use data to influence people, processes, and technology in order to build a more data-driven organization.
According to Boone, there is no shortage of data that a DevOps organization produces. He recommends starting with data-driven DevOps by asking questions like: “How are we interacting as a team? How are we processing work? How do we handle work? How do we track work?”
When working with customers, he starts off by looking into source code and management tools and trying to make correlations between the code that is being written and the business value it brings.
“Just by looking at those two areas you can easily start to see where we’re spending our time as an organization, what we are prioritizing over other work, and then you get to start asking some really interesting questions, like ‘is that what we should be working on? Is that really the priority thing we should be doing?’ … Right out of the gate, for a lot of folks, looking at those two pieces of data can start to allow you to ask many more important questions. The more data points we pull in, the more interesting the story gets,” said Boone.
Data can also be used to manage security and governance. According to Boone, it can allow CISOs and AppSec teams to start answering questions like “Are we getting better at security as an organization? Are we getting better at quality as an organization?”
Watch the Power Talk, “How to build a data-driven DevOps culture,” in order to learn more about getting started. In the talk, Boone and Schuck will discuss the foundational elements for data-first strategy development.
