Microsoft Launches New Project To Help Enterprises Improve Their DevOps Practices

Microsoft today announced a new project that aims to help developers and IT pros in the enterprise — and even smaller development shops — improve their DevOps practices. The company today launched both a self-assessment tool that gives companies recommendations for how to improve their development practices, as well as an e-book that chronicles Microsoft’s own learnings in this area over the last few years.
“We had to learn how to be excellent at running scaled services on the cloud for millions of users,” Microsoft’s Sam Guckenheimer told me. “We find that there is very high interest in having learnings shared about things like how you do experiments well or how you manage technical debt.”
Guckenheimer tells me that the tool doesn’t try to tell you that everything you’ve been doing is wrong.
Instead, it will recommend what a company’s next steps in improving their current practices should be. The self-assessment tool, for example, may recommend that when you try to address technical debt, you’ll want to do that by adding static analysis to capture a baseline of your code now.

“We go through these practice areas and help you with the next set of chess moves you need to make to become more effective,” Guckenheimer said. “These may be already practiced by some excellent born-in-the-cloud companies, but our experience is that people come to us all the time and ask us for help with them.” He also stressed that none of the recommendations are tied to any specific technology or company and the self-assessment recommendations don’t focus on specific tools — not even Microsoft’s.
“We are not doing this to say we have a unique answer. We are trying to help with what we perceive to be the most requested need, which is not about tools,” he noted. “People don’t have trouble finding Git or monitoring tools.”