Software Maturity Assessment: Level 1

Your Software Maturity Level: Basic

Your organization is at the beginning of its software maturity journey. This is an exciting time with significant opportunities for improvement and growth. Many successful organizations started exactly where you are today. The action plan below outlines a few areas of focus and some tools to investigate.

Building the Foundations

Teams at this level often struggle with manual processes, inconsistent practices, and a lack of visibility into their systems. Addressing these gaps is critical to improving delivery speed, reliability, and collaboration.

Key Actions and Tools

Version Control

What to do: Set up Git or a similar system if you don’t already use one. Define a simple branching strategy such as main for production and feature branches for development.

Why it matters: Without consistent version control, collaboration is chaotic, and rollbacks are nearly impossible.

Tools to try: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.

OpsLevel’s role: Use OpsLevel to ensure every service is tracked in your catalog and linked to the right repositories.

Deployment Practices

What to do: Automate build and deployment processes for at least one critical service. Use basic CI/CD pipelines to minimize human error.

Why it matters: Manual deployments are error-prone and slow. Automation speeds up delivery and improves confidence.

Tools to try: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI.

Testing Automation

What to do: Introduce unit tests for your most critical service using a testing framework.

Why it matters: Catching bugs early reduces the cost of fixing them and prevents production issues.

Tools to try: Jest (JavaScript), PyTest (Python), JUnit (Java).

OpsLevel’s role: Use our Checks feature to enforce basic testing standards across services.

Production Readiness

What to do: Set up basic monitoring with uptime checks and error logging for key services.

Why it matters: Visibility into system health is essential to prevent outages and troubleshoot effectively.

Tools to try: UptimeRobot, Pingdom, Loggly.

Developer Autonomy

What to do: Create simple, self-service templates for provisioning services.

Why it matters: Reducing reliance on centralized teams speeds up delivery.

Tools to try: Terraform for infrastructure templates.

Priorities

1. Implement Git and define a branching strategy.

2. Automate deployments for one service.

3. Set up basic monitoring.

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Ready to level up your software maturity game? Book a call with us to learn how OpsLevel can help you improve quality without slowing down your team.

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