DevOps Assessment Guide: Measuring Automation & Maturity

Before jumping into DevOps assessments, we should first explore the link between DevOps and infrastructure automation. 

Infrastructure automation is at the heart of DevOps engineering. Once DevOps practices were implemented, the shift from manual infrastructure creation and deployment swiftly shifted to infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines that took care of these deployments.  

Tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Azure Bicep, and Google Cloud Manager have emerged, helping teams write infrastructure as code and bringing reusability to the table.

Even though DevOps is traditionally more associated with CI/CD, infrastructure automation is pivotal for managing application deployment, ensuring that it can scale, and enabling all of the CI/CD processes.

A DevOps assessment is a structured evaluation of an organization’s current DevOps practices, tools, culture, and processes. It typically covers aspects such as CI/CD implementation, infrastructure as code, monitoring, testing, and team alignment.

A DevOps assessment tool is a questionnaire, framework, or platform designed to evaluate your enterprise’s maturity and effectiveness. This can help you and your team understand:

• How you compare to industry leaders
• What you can do to improve existing processes
• When and how to use automation
• How to improve your observability
• How to elevate your security and governance
• How to enable speed while staying in control
• How to foster collaboration
• And more

These tools usually benchmark your current state, identify gaps and inefficiencies, and provide actionable insights into how you can overcome these challenges.

Why run a DevOps maturity assessment?

Today, infrastructure teams work with distributed architectures, multicloud and on-premise environments, and the number of tools, products, and processes they use is growing. 

This complexity creates a number of challenges, such as maintaining visibility across operations, ensuring that best practices are applied, addressing technical debt, and overcoming process inefficiencies. 

All of these challenges are difficult to solve if you do not use the best tools and products for your use cases.

A comprehensive DevOps assessment helps you identify these gaps. If done right, it should also provide your organization with a clear roadmap of what it needs to do to improve, step by step. Furthermore, by following the roadmap, you should be able to reach DevOps excellence by regularly tracking progress over time, measuring the impact of improvement efforts, and ensuring that your DevOps processes are built for scale.

Several key metrics should be considered when evaluating DevOps maturity:

1. Percentage of infrastructure automated – ClickOps can be beneficial when you are learning a new tool, or even a new cloud provider, as it gives you an easy feel of how to do things. In the long run, however, manually created infrastructure will hurt your business because it is hard to replicate and hard to track. The higher the percentage of your automated infrastructure, the more mature your DevOps is.
2. Deployment frequency – Making production deployments faster and on-demand usually translates into a higher DevOps maturity. This means that you have enabled speed, but at the same time, without control, a higher deployment frequency will also translate into more issues, rather than having something that works properly
3. Change failure rates — This is the percentage of changes that fail and require remediation. In the 2025 Infrastructure Automation report, we found that almost half of the companies have to rerun deployments more than four times to get them right.
4. Mean time to recovery — This is the time it takes to recover from a failed change. It reflects operational resilience and how fast you react to incidents.
5. Percentage of observability – What you are monitoring, how you are monitoring, and what percentage of your infrastructure and applications are monitored are key to improving the performance, reliability, and behavior of your components.
6. Team collaboration – The effectiveness of cross-functional teams, communication, and ease of collaboration provided by the tools and products you use will help you advane your DevOps maturity.

A successful DevOps assessment starts with clear goals. You must decide what you are trying to accomplish by conducting it: benchmark progress, increase collaboration, reduce failure rates, or justify the budget spent on resources. When you have a clear understanding of your goals, you should:

• Identify a maturity model: Use a framework that aligns with your organization’s needs. Standard ones include DORA or CALMS, but you can use a customized model too.
• Engage all teams: Stakeholders from software engineering, DevOps engineering, platform engineering, and even security should be included. By having more than one team involved, you ensure the impact of the assessment in several key areas.
• Analyze assessment result: Looking at the score is just one part of the analysis; you should also examine how the teams collaborate while doing the assessment, friction points, and the culture (blame vs solution culture).
• Create a clear plan: The assessment should give you clear next steps on what you want to improve and your priorities.
• Reassess regularly: As you complete each step, gather everyone to discuss progress, and see what you need to do to adapt your strategy for the next steps.

Tools and resources for DevOps assessment

There are several tools, surveys, and platforms available that can help you assess your DevOps maturity:

• Surveys and self-assessment tools – DORA DevOps quick check
• Assessment platforms – Plandek, GitLab DevOps Reports
• Internal dashboards – Building observability dashboards can give you hints on where your maturity stands.
• Workshops – Open-source templates can be found in the DevOps Institute, CNCF, or ThoughtWorks.
• Books and learning platforms – Refer to books and look at the many courses available on LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, or Pluralsight.

Combining these resources can ensure your assessment is thorough, actionable, and aligns well with your organization’s current context and goals.

Infrastructure automation report

Spacelift has also commissioned research in this area. You can read the 2025 Infrastructure Automation report and even do a self-assessment to understand where you are and what you can do to improve. In this research, we found that over 45% of organizations think they are excelling at automation, while in reality, only 14% have achieved automation excellence.

Traditional DevOps assessments provide four maturity categories, usually identified as Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Elite. Our framework takes a more nuanced approach.

Our report also identifies four stages: Experimenter, Adopter, Optimizer, and Leader. It recognizes there is some level of automation at even the earliest stage, although it may be ad hoc and lacking formal standardization.

Here is a distribution of the survey participants across the four levels of the Infrastructure Automation Leadership Index:

Using the results to advance DevOps automation and maturity

Depending on the maturity level, we came up with different guides that can help you accelerate to the next level. We also provide a guide to next steps for leaders to elevate their excellence:

• Experimenter guide
• Adopter guide
• Optimizer guide
• Leader guide

Questions asked when building the framework

When the questionnaire was built, several models were used to determine the most important factors associated with infrastructure automation, which is closely aligned with your DevOps processes. These are the key questions that emerged:

1. What percentage of your infrastructure is managed by infrastructure as code (IaC)?
2. Which infrastructure processes are currently automated at your organization?
3. What strategies does your organization use to handle configuration drift?
4. To what extent does your infrastructure automation foster collaboration between your software engineering, platform engineering, and security teams?
5. Is your organization considering a shift to platform engineering to centralize automation efforts?

These questions help you identify the key drivers of infrastructure automation that directly impact your DevOps maturity. 

Knowing how much of your infrastructure is managed by IaC reveals how easy it is to scale, replicate, and move fast while staying in control. Automating provisioning, configuration management, container orchestration, patching, and backups shows your progress in reducing manual effort. 

Unmanaged configuration drift leads to security issues, downtime, and inconsistent environments. Collaboration is pivotal to your organization’s success, and automation with the right products can help you break down silos, and enable faster and safer deployments. 

Shifting to platform engineering helps enhance the organization’s readiness to scale by using reusable internal platforms.

Even if you conduct a perfect DevOps assessment, the next steps are crucial and must be executed thoughtfully. Here are some common mistakes to avoid:

1. Don’t treat DevOps assessments as a once-off activity. You should regularly assess your DevOps maturity, especially after implementing changes inspired by the assessment.
2. Don’t focus exclusively on tools; instead, find tools that can help you implement team collaboration, tight feedback loops, and an improved culture.
3. Implement changes that align with your team’s size, structure, and goals. What works for a company with 1000+ employees doesn’t necessarily work for a company with fewer than 50 employees.
4. Don’t overlook follow-up plans. Assessments should lead to improvements, not just scores and charts in an Excel spreadsheet.
5. Don’t focus solely on DevOps. Doing so will deliver only a partial view of the issues. Involve members from security, software engineering, and others to ensure you get the full picture.
6. Don’t try to implement all the changes at once, as this may lead to frustration and more problems in the long run.

Spacelift can be used throughout the entire DevOps landscape, as it supports tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terragrunt. It provides a default deployment workflow for all of these tools, making it easy for you to handle the CI and CD processes for your infrastructure without needing to write complex workflows. 

This default workflow can also be tailored to your needs. You can control what happens between runner phases, making it easy to integrate third-party tools inside your workflows.

By leveraging Spacelift’s policy-as-code framework based on Open Policy Agent, you can easily build policies that restrict resources or resource parameters, require approvals for runs and tasks, control where to send notifications, or even control what happens when a PR is open or merged. This helps elevate your overall security and governance and minimizes the chances of human errors.

As we discuss security and governance, we should also address reliability. Spacelift’s built-in drift detection and remediation feature will inform you when infrastructure changes are made outside of your IaC processes, allowing you to automatically recover from them.

The quality of your self-service mechanism also influences DevOps maturity, as this is usually one of the greatest bottlenecks that impact software development. With Spacelift, you can build self-service with Blueprints, which are yaml templates for your Spacelift stacks and all associated configurations (policies, contexts, cloud integrations, lifecycle hooks, and more). 

In addition, Blueprints can be easily integrated with ServiceNow, meeting your developers where they are and making it easier for them to create infrastructure from the tools they know and use. 

If your organization favors Kubernetes, Spacelift also offers its own K8s operator that lets you easily create Spacelift resources from K8s and build workflows for your favorite tools.

DevOps assessment guides are essential for fostering collaboration, improving processes, and balancing speed and control to ensure fewer failures, downtime, and a better overall customer experience. 

To make them successful, you should always ensure you have a follow-up plan, set up regular cadence meetings to discuss progress, and reassess as soon as you have implemented some of the changes, and enough time has passed to see some results based on them.

We encourage you to try the Infrastructure Automation Self-Assessment tool, find out where you stand, and then take one of the guides and see some actionable insights on how to improve.