Where to start?? DevOps Basics - Part 4
Analyze your application portfolio (Application Portfolio Analysis)
It’s not uncommon for large enterprises to have hundreds of applications in all forms and shapes using different underlying technologies, buisness processes and DevOps capabilities. The wise way to invest your time and money wisely is to perform an application portfolio analysis (APA), to identify which applications should be focused on.
There are 4 dimesions of an APA. For each category you collect the data and you translate it into a relative graph. The graph will help you identify the applications that are the most important to focus on. If a good amount of data is not available, you can use estimated values to get a rough idea of the applications that need to be focused on. Namely, these are:
- Current investment profile: The current investment profile refers to the amount of money and effort being spent on an application and is used to evaluate the expected return on investment.
- Change frequency: Change frequency is the frequency with which changes are made to an application and the desired frequency of deployment.
- Criticality: Criticality refers to the impact of an application on the business and is used to assess the risk of failure.
- Technology stack: Technology stack refers to the underlying technology used by an application and is used to evaluate the complexity of changes and risk of failure.
By ranking applications based on these four dimensions and using a rating system, organizations can prioritize their list of applications and focus on a minimum viable cluster (MVC) of applications to address first in the DevOps transformation.
The process for managing and optimizing an organization’s application portfolio (APM) involves three main steps:
- Inventory Phase: information is gathered about the current IT landscape and applications are evaluated for their business relevancy.
- Assessment Phase: applications are classified using the TIME strategy (tolerate, invest, migrate, eliminate) or other strategies suited to the organization’s culture and evaluated based on factors such as technical standards, staff skill sets, user satisfaction, and cost.
- Defining a future state: the focus is on aligning the IT transformation process with business goals by connecting applications to the appropriate business capability.
DevOps and Agile development can help improve the speed of product development, but it is important to consider the overall quality and reliability of the applications.