DevOps Maturity Model

Whether you’re just starting your DevOps journey or already deep into automation and delivery pipelines, it helps to know where you currently stand — and where you could go next.

That’s why I created this DevOps Maturity Model (or DMM for short), an open-source tool designed to help teams and organisations assess, track, and improve their DevOps practices over time.

🚀 So What Is It Then?

The DMM is a simple web-based tool that:

• Helps you evaluate your DevOps capabilities across multiple high level dimensions (like Automation, Infrastructure, Culture, etc.)
• Lets you visualise your progress over time using a graph
• Generates the beginnings of a Gap Analysis Report to help you plan improvements
• Is fully customisable to match your team’s language, processes, or priorities

It’s designed to run locally (via Docker or NPM with the source code), so that you stay in control of your data.

🎯 Why Did I Make It?

It was inspired by conversations I had at my organisation. I wanted to have a way to fill the gap between DevOps knowledge and understanding (e.g. Accelerate, DORA reports, DevOps Handbook, Phoenix Project etc) and what we think of as traditional DevOps tooling (Terraform, Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub, Kubernetes etc). This model does not recommend any tooling. This is a tool to assist the user in forging communications with the wider team to produce a route to transformation aligning to DevOps principles. Additionally, I realised that most engineers are busy and have significant existing cognitive load - they might understand the requirements but fail to grasp the nuance and specifics of DevOps and need straightforward guidance. I also wanted to avoid and negative language associated with the foundation levels, such as is used in DORA’s performance levels, in order to encourage and promote even basic adoption of DevOps as a step in the right direction.

Hence, I wanted something:

• Lightweight, portable and easy to present in workshops or retrospectives
• That I could tailor to different teams and contexts
• With enough structure to guide conversation, but not so rigid that it becomes prescriptive
• That was maintainable over time
• That incorporated visual elements to display results

There are many great frameworks that already exist out there, but I needed something that teams could own and evolve, not just fill in once and forget. I chose to focus on how to apply real-world changes to a project so that they could set their goals on improving the key DORA metrics.

🔍 How It Works

1. Start with a DevOps survey or quick value stream map of your project to get a baseline state.
2. Go through the model and select your current level for each subdimension (e.g. from “Foundational” to “Leading”).
3. Save your answers and generate the Gap Analysis Report.
4. Use the report to plan small experiments — a Kata or a PDCA cycle.
5. Revisit the model regularly to track improvements over time and use the graph to see where you’re improving (or not!).

The tool gives you a visual representation of where you’re strong, where you can grow, and how things change sprint by sprint.

🧩 Customisable & Developer-Friendly

It’s built with:

• Node.js + Express backend
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript frontend
• SQLite database (lightweight and local)

The maturity dimensions are defined in a dimensions.json file, so you can change the structure, labels, levels, and language to fit your team’s style.

You can also run it locally using the Docker image, with a single command. No vendor lock-in. No SaaS required. Alternatively, run it in the cloud somewhere!

🛠️ Try It Out

• View the repo: DevOps Maturity Model on GitLab
• Run it with Docker:

  docker run -d --name devops-maturity-model \
    -p 3131:3131 \
    -v devops_data:/app/data \
    registry.gitlab.com/devops-maturity-model/devops-maturity-model:latest
  

📝 Licensed Under GPL v3

This project is fully open source, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. You’re free to use it, adapt it, and contribute back.

🙏 And Finally

Thanks for reading this post. Please raise an issue if you have any problems with the model or feel free to reach out if you find the model useful and want to ask me about it. Also, feel free to fork the model and customise it for your team or project.

N.B. DevOps banner image drawn by my daughter!