# The CALMS Framework > CALMS stands for Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement and Sharing. Learn how the framework makes your DevOps transformation measurable. Source: https://www.xalt.de/en/blog/calms-framework/ TEAM XALT Atlassian Platinum Partner · 30 November 2021 · 7 min CALMS is a framework that allows you to assess how well your organization can adopt DevOps processes. At the same time, you can use it to measure the success of a DevOps transformation. The goals of DevOps include: - Establish an open culture that brings all teams together. - Automate code tests, automate workflows, automate infrastructure – in short, *automate everything.* ### Assess skills and progress with regard to DevOps CALMS stands for Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing. But what exactly do these buzzwords mean? ### CALMS at a glance - **Culture:**Silos within the organization lead to bottlenecks in the company. Before these silos can be dismantled, a culture of shared responsibility and collaboration is needed. Only when all stakeholders involved in the product work together do further steps make sense. - **Automation:**Here, teams looking to implement DevOps should automate as many manual tasks as possible – particularly in continuous integration and test automation. - **Lean:** Development teams use Lean principles to avoid unnecessary resource consumption and optimize value creation: less parallel work (WIP), better visibility of results, less complex handovers, and shorter waiting times. - **Measurement:**The organization consistently collects data on its processes, deployments, and more to understand its current state and identify where improvements are possible. - **Sharing:**Openness and knowledge exchange within and between teams – supported by the right tools – ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. This reduces friction during handovers when problems arise. ## CALMS – Culture DevOps is not something you can simply implement quickly. It is a culture that affects your entire IT. Every team, from product management to development to operations – and also the way you manage your IT infrastructure. DevOps connects different departments to foster exchange and collaboration. Automation and tools are nice to have, but become useless at a certain point if IT and operations do not work closely together. DevOps does not solve tool problems here, but communication problems. Therefore, see DevOps much more as an evolution of your agile way of working. That is: All teams pull in the same direction with a common goal. Everyone involved in the product must be included: product management, development, operations, quality management, customer success, and all other stakeholders. Pro tip: Consider reorganising your teams. Move away from functional teams (development, operations, infrastructure) towards product teams. Ensure that all stakeholders involved in a product can work together seamlessly. This way, you break down blocking silos. It is important to work together towards a common goal and to have a clear plan for how to get there. Such a radical step towards purely product-based teams is not always the right path and can quickly create new problems. After all, you cannot always involve everyone from the very beginning. ### Small steps towards a DevOps culture To make DevOps succeed and initiate a cultural shift in your teams, you can start with these practices: - Joint sprint planning: As a development team, also invite operations to your regular sprint planning sessions. - Hold daily stand-ups with all stakeholders. - Operations teams can invite developers to their meetings. - Product managers sit at the interface between the (end) customer and development. However, communication only from top to bottom is of little help here. Therefore, introduce a joint meeting or kickoff to clarify all the impacts of changes, updates, and similar matters. As you can see: communication is the A and O in DevOps. Without good communication, it is difficult to achieve the goals of individual departments (or teams) and the company's objectives. ### Our best practices for a DevOps culture At XALT, not only development and operations are part of the DevOps culture, but the entire company embraces this change and practises open communication. All teams and functions are part of the strategy. In addition to DevOps and product management, sales, marketing, and consulting are also involved in the communication. This is how we bring very different approaches together and work jointly towards a single goal. We extend the DevOps approach with the Flywheel method. The term DevOps is actually too narrow for us. The open communication structure allows us to respond to any external influence and solve it together. Customer satisfaction, for example, concerns not just sales or customer success, but the entire company. And that is exactly how we respond to it. ## CALMS – Automation A core idea of DevOps is the automation of recurring tasks and processes in product development. Implementing DevOps means automating everything to free up resources that you can deploy in other important areas. ### Pro tip: You can start by automating build, test, deployment, and provisioning. These are typical entry points for teams at the beginning of their automation journey. After all, think about it: how else do you create the space for all stakeholders to work together on solutions that benefit everyone? But how do you best get started with automation? Where do I create the most value for my team and my company? ### Continuous Delivery With Continuous Delivery, you ensure that only code that contains no errors and does not cause further errors or problems in the software goes live on the production system. New code is automatically checked for errors and security vulnerabilities for this purpose. The majority of this approach is supported by dedicated cloud infrastructure. Automated tests also help development and operations teams save resources. #### But why are automated tests so valuable? Computers analyse new code faster, more effectively, and more securely than any human. In addition, you can run multiple tests in parallel. This means that not only errors but also security risks are detected more quickly. And you can react immediately and decide for yourself how to proceed. Another major advantage of tests: there are no big surprises at release time. Automated deployments also point out differences between environments to IT. ### Configuration / Infrastructure as Code Another entry point into automation is "Configuration as Code". With this approach, you automate the configuration of your infrastructure (in the cloud), so to speak. Just as you, as a developer, break software down into small parts that all function redundantly and together form your app, your infrastructure can also be structured this way. Depending on what you need at the moment, it can be adjusted, started, or stopped with simple changes to the code (the configuration). This ensures that your operations team only provides infrastructure when it is needed – and in the extent that it is needed. These two examples are just a small taste of what is possible with DevOps. However, the idea can be taken even further. With Blue-Green deployments, for example, you can run multiple instances of the same system in parallel. While one is accessible to users, the other is used for testing new features, updates, or hotfixes. This ensures that the production system always runs stably, and updates only go live when the new code runs without errors. Here you can find more information on [Blue-Green Deployments and DevOps](https://www.xalt.de/en/continuous-integration-and-delivery/). ## CALMS – Lean The DevOps culture is the foundation, and that is exactly where Lean comes into play. Lean deals with the principles of agile delivery. It ensures fast processes and smooth workflows, making your Cloud DevOps organisation responsive. The DevOps culture helps you identify opportunities for continuous improvement everywhere. Some are obvious, such as regular retrospectives to improve your team's processes. Others are more subtle, such as A/B testing different onboarding paths for new users of your product. You should assume that errors will occur sooner or later. Therefore, work towards finding these errors quickly, fixing them even faster, and learning from them in a retrospective. The magic word is: continuous improvement. Because only by learning from these errors can you improve your processes and approach. ## CALMS – Measurement You have now internalised and put into practice three parts of the CALMS framework. Time for the next step: collect all relevant data. Without data, you will hardly be able to detect possible errors, problems, or bottlenecks. Fortunately, there are many tools and technologies with which you can measure the performance of your teams and processes. For example: How often do your users use the product, or how frequently do critical system errors occur? But that is not all. You can ask almost any question and gain valuable data from it. It is best to integrate data collection into your automation pipeline from day one – this ensures that performance is measurable on an ongoing basis. To give you an initial idea of the data you can collect, here are some examples. ### Questions for data collection: 1. How long does it take from development to deployment? 2. How frequently do bugs or errors occur in the software? 3. What is the MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) for critical system errors? 4. How many active users are using the system? 5. How many users report bugs or errors? 6. How often does the system go down? 7. How often are updates and similar things released? Ultimately: The more robust the data you collect, the easier it is for you and your team to improve. In addition to the questions above, you can also determine the satisfaction of your users. SLAs (Service Level Agreements) help you with this. ### Pro tip: Contact your users regularly and actively ask about problems and improvement wishes. This helps you plan the product roadmap and prioritise tasks. #### Example of product improvement and data collection: More and more users are avoiding your software and cancelling their monthly subscription or the premium version. The churn rate is rising and rising. The question you then ask yourself: "For what reason are we losing users?" Are features missing? Too many bugs? Too much [technical debt](https://www.xalt.de/en/blog/technical-debt-in-agile-software-development/)? So first find out the exact reason. And then initiate the necessary steps. ## CALMS – Sharing Sharing information is closely linked to the culture part of the CALMS framework. In the DevOps context, however, sharing also means a culture of openness and trust. Above all, it is about sharing all information and best practices and making them available to every stakeholder. This sustainably breaks down the silos in your company. Learn more about [knowledge management in the company in](https://www.xalt.de/en/webinar-knowledge-management-with-confluence/) our webinar. Culture and the exchange of information are one of the most important parts of the entire DevOps methodology and the foundation for structural change in your organisation. Silos between departments and missing information for stakeholders ultimately lead to frustration and further alienation in the company. In the worst case, this has a negative impact on the company's goals. ### A few hard numbers on DevOps – and why modern IT organisations are relying on it - 60% of developers release their code twice as fast thanks to DevOps – an increase of 25% compared to 2021. - 72% of security professionals rate their company's security work as "good" or "strong" – an increase of 13% compared to 2021. - 56% of members of operations teams say they work "fully" or predominantly automated – an increase of 10% compared to 2021. - Just under 25% of respondents have fully automated their tests – an increase of 13% compared to 2021. - 75% of teams use AI/ML or bots for testing and code reviews, or plan to do so – an increase of 41% compared to 2021. Source: [Gitlab DevOps Report 2021](https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/) Do you want to learn more about DevOps, take your DevOps work to the next level, or automate even more? Then get in touch with us – we will show you how we support your company on the way to a genuine cloud-based DevOps culture. ## Ready to take your DevOps to the next level with CALMS? We'll help you with culture, automation and measurement on your way to becoming a genuine DevOps organization. [Talk to us](https://www.xalt.de/en/contact/) ## More articles ### [The Agent Harness: The Real Foundation of Enterprise AI](https://www.xalt.de/en/blog/agent-harness-foundation-enterprise-ai/) Why the agent harness – not the AI model or the generated code – determines the success of enterprise AI initiatives, and how to build one in five steps. *DevOps* ### [Governing Agentic AI Safely: Zero Trust and Compliance for AI Agents](https://www.xalt.de/en/blog/governing-agentic-ai-zero-trust-compliance/) AI agents are transforming the enterprise at speed – and the risk is growing just as fast. How the "in dubio pro securitate" principle, formal verification, and zero trust keep agentic AI safe and compliant. *DevOps* ### [Shift Left: Catching Bugs Earlier in Your Development Cycle](https://www.xalt.de/en/blog/shift-left/) Bugs found late cost time, money, and trust. The shift-left approach moves testing and quality assurance as early as possible into the development cycle. *DevOps* --- *This version is for AI agents. Every page of this site is available as Markdown: append `index.md` to its path. Index of all pages: [llms.txt](https://www.xalt.de/llms.txt)*