Microsoft DevOps Deployment Assessment

Pre-Engagement Questionnaire
Purpose of questionnaire:
This questionnaire helps us gather information around your current DevOps
practices, in preparation for our DevOps Deployment Planning Services
engagement. The questions outlined below will provide us with a general picture on
your organization, and also highlight areas that may need more attention.
Please fill out the questionnaire to the best of your ability. Due to the nature of this
engagement, these questions will require more than a simple yes or no answer.
They will require some time and thought as they are more open-ended in an effort
to help us understand more about you and your organization.

Question

Response
Backlog

How are requirements stored and gathered?

How are requirements prioritized? Who is
involved in the prioritization process?
Does each team work from a single,
prioritized backlog of work? Are
development and operations backlogs
separate or combined?
How is stakeholder feedback solicited and
maintained?

Schedule and Team

What is the makeup of development teams?
Are teams in skill-specific silos?
How is work scheduled? Are there
structured, fixed iterations? If so, what is
the length of iterations?
How is in-progress work tracked and
visualized?
Is there a definitive and explicit definition of
done for all phases of work?
Are unit tests and test automation
employed throughout the development
process?

Technical Debt

Question

Response

Is technical debt (lack of unit tests, legacy

code, etc.) identified and a system to
reduce it in place?
What is the system for managing database
changes? How are database changes linked
to application changes?
What is the current branching/code
isolation practice? Is it understood and
enforced? How is merging managed? Do
defects arise as a result of integration?
Are code reviews performed? Required?
How is the code review process managed?

Flow
How are deployments to testing, staging
and production managed? Is there an
automated framework in place to manage
deployments?
How often are releases, both major and
minor, deployed to the various
environments?
What is the current build process? Is
continuous integration used? What
technology is in place to manage builds?
How are database changes built and
deployed?
How are the current deployment
environments configured? How closely do
the testing and staging environments
mimic the production environment?

Evidence
What system is used to record, triage, and
prioritize customer-reported defects or
suggestions?
How are production defects logged, triaged,
and prioritized for action?
How is feature usage and feature
effectiveness monitored and tracked after
release?

Production
What mechanisms are in place to monitor
and alert on production systems? How are
the metrics Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

Question

Response

and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

measured and recorded?
What is the current disaster recovery plan?
Does the plan account for all development
and production environments?
How is capacity measured? Is there a
system in place to automatically adjust
resources to handle additional demand?

Cloud
What is your policy for using the public
cloud?
When a dev team wants more
infrastructure, what do they do?
When a dev team wants to update a
release, what do they do?
Who makes the decisions about application
hosting?
How do you define environments for

dev/test, the release pipeline and

production?
How do you deploy to environments for

dev/test, the release pipeline and

production?