Top 4 Factors that Evaluate Software Development Capabilities for Building Microservices

In previous blog articles, we got acquainted with microservices and monolith architecture. Considering that each architecture has some advances and challenges, which architecture to choose for the next project? I discussed when microservices might be a bad idea and when you should choose them. Many different types of projects can be developed with a microservice architecture, but not all companies have the necessary skills to create these kinds of apps.
The reality is that many companies are not ready for microservices. As a result, it's essential to take steps now to prepare yourself and your company so you can enter this new age of development with the knowledge needed to succeed.

Do you know the key factors that evaluate your development capabilities and if your company is ready for microservices? Learn some key factors that evaluate whether or not a software company will be able to move into the world of microservices.

Key factors in evaluating software development capabilities

Microservice development is a highly specialized task and requires organizations to be at the top of their game. It's a complex architecture that requires advanced software development practices. Poorly performing or inexperienced organizations are likely to face many obstacles in creating, deploying, maintaining, monitoring, or supporting microservices.

Micro-managing your apps can result in some serious challenges that may not have been present before. For example - if you don't know how best practices should look for managing APIs with services like Kubernetes, then there's no telling what might happen!

Many factors determine software development capabilities. In 2018, authors Nicole Forsgren, PhD Jez Humble and Gene Kim published the results of their thought-out scientific study on software development organization capabilities in the form of their book, Accelerate.

Years and years spent researching, analyzing data helped him identify four key metrics for evaluating an organization's performance in software delivery capability. Key metrics:

• Deployment frequency 
• Lead time for changes
• Meantime to recovery (MTTR)
• Change failure rate 

Deployment frequency

Deployment frequency is a measure of how often the software you're developing goes into production. The more frequently your team pushes out new releases, the higher their deployment frequency will be.

	Hight performance organization	Doing that on-demand, potentially multiple times per day.
	Deploy once a week and once a month.	Deploy once a week and once a month.
	Low performance organization	Deploy once a week and once a month but has much more variability than the medium performers.

Lead time for changes

The time it takes to build, test, and deploy a new feature increment is referred to as lead time.

	Hight performance organization	Can do that in less than one hour.
	Deploy once a week and once a month.	Can do that between one week and one month.
	Low performance organization	Can do that between one week and one month; their lead times are more variable than medium performers.

Meantime to recovery (MTTR)

When service is interrupted due to a change that causes a problem, the meantime to recovery is the time it takes to restore service.

	Hight performance organization	Can do this in less than one hour.
	Deploy once a week and once a month.	Complete in less than a day.
	Low performance organization	Complete between one day and one week.

Change failure rate

The percentage of changes sent to production that cause service degradation or require prompt remediation is known as the change failure rate.

	Hight performance organization	This happens anywhere from 0-15% of the time.
	Deploy once a week and once a month.	This happens anywhere from 0-15% of the time.
	Low performance organization	Failure rate tends to be between 31-45%.

Key Metrics for Software Delivery Capability

Based on research, those are top indicators for software development capabilities. Let's took those key metrics and put them into a comparison table. You can compare your organization with those metrics and see if the organization is capable of adapting microservices or not.

	Ready	Caution	Not Ready
	Hight performance	Medium performance	Low performance
Deployment frequency	On-demand	Once a week to once a month	Once a week to once a month*
Lead time for changes	Less than one hour	One week to one month	One week to one month*
Meantime to recovery (MTTR)	Lesss than one hour	Less than one day	One day to one week
Change failure rate	0-15%	0-15%	31-45%

If you rate as:

• Hight performance organization - You are capable of adopting microservices
• Medium performance organization - Most likely, you are capable of adapting microservices, but with caution.
• Low performance organization - It strongly recommends against adopting microservices.

Improvement Process

It takes time and effort to create an organizational culture primed for success with microservice architecture. Still, it's worth doing if you want better agility with software development. Eventually, even small companies will realize they need more than one person to develop their systems as their complexity grows over time.
If your company is not ready for microservices, it might be time to implement some changes that will help you transform into a more efficient organization.

Culture 

Learning and teaching are the key to success. It is a well-known fact that the learning and teaching environment plays an essential role in any organization. It is important that employees learn new skills while also offering them self-education opportunities through training programs and educating others on how they work best. In addition, by adapting their style as educators for themselves or other colleagues, they can accelerate this journey towards improving software development capabilities within your workforce.
Taking the time and look back over the process tools to become more effective over time.

It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day hustle and forget about how far you've come. Take time by looking back on your overall processes and tools that made it possible for you to become more effective, as this is one of the most important steps!

DevOps Culture

To ensure that software is always delivered on time, the company must ensure development and operation are fully integrated into all processes. Creating team responsibilities for their software during production and building robust automation and tools that will help minimize friction when delivering it. Monitoring system performance also helps guide future decision-making as well as opportunities for improvement.

Quality Culture

It would help if you always were investigating the design improvements of your software.

You must constantly explore new and inventive ways to improve your systems. Allocate at least one dedicated software architect who works exclusively on shepherding the system architecture. Implementing and improving robust test automation to ensure no significant errors in production will enhance the organization's quality culture. 

Conclusion

Microservices are hard. An inexperienced company is likely to face many obstacles when it comes to managing microservices. In this blog, we have seen vital factors that evaluate software development capabilities. Organizations with high deployment frequency, low lead time for changes, short MTTRs (mean-time to recovery), and low change failure rates will have higher success rates when developing microservices than those who do not meet these requirements. Companies that perform as a low level organization are strongly recommended to avoid microservices.