Uplevel has launched a consulting service to help organizations modernize their software engineering development practices.
Leveraging the metric collected via the existing Uplevel Engineering Intelligence Platform, the Uplevel Method service provides access to process reengineering expertise that will help organizations significantly improve the productivity of their software engineering teams.
Uplevel CEO Joe Levy said that the approach goes beyond merely collecting DevOps metrics to include analysis of how faster software-building and deployment benefits an organization.
At its core, the Uplevel platform provides software development teams access to a Connector Hub that collects metadata from DevOps tools and platforms and then applies machine learning algorithms to surface actionable insights. The method service provides access to the expertise needed to apply those insights in a way that achieves a measurable business outcome, said Levy.
Organizations can either simply contract Uplevel to do an assessment of their software engineering practices or become more deeply involved in the change management process as they, for example, embrace platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale more efficiently. That latter service often proves to be crucial because change management at that level usually requires organizations to address a range of social and technical challenges that need to be overcome in tandem, noted Levy.
Additionally, as more organizations begin to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) to augment their DevOps teams, the number of organizations that will need to re-engineer their DevOps workflows as more code is created faster is only going to continue to increase. The challenge is more code being written doesn’t always directly result in higher-quality applications being deployed faster. An Uplevel survey of 800 software developers working on large engineering teams that have adopted the GitHub Copilot finds there have been limited gains in productivity. For example, the number of vulnerabilities being created by developers using GitHub Copilot actually increased. Nor have development teams seen any improvement or decrease in pull request (PR) cycle time or overall throughput in terms of the number of pull requests merged. Instead, developers have experienced a 41% increase in bugs within pull requests, the survey finds.
Each organization will need to determine exactly how much business value there is to be derived from accelerating the development of applications. In theory, organizations that can build and deploy software should be more competitive, but depending on the vertical industry the amount of pressure being applied to achieve that goal may vary widely.
Regardless of approach, DevOps leaders are always asked by senior management to justify the level of investment being made. Many of the metrics that DevOps teams track today don’t easily correlate to an outcome those senior leaders can appreciate so there is a need to correlate the efforts of application developers to specific outcomes. Otherwise, rather than being viewed as a strategic business asset, application development winds up being managed in isolation from the rest of the business it was meant to serve.
