On the Benefits of the Accelerate Metrics: An Industrial Survey at Vendasta

Abstract

The popularity of the Accelerate metrics is increasing in the industry. The Accelerate metrics are four key metrics to evaluate the software delivery performance: lead time for changes, deployment frequency, mean time to recover, change fail rate. However, their benefits in monitoring the development process performance of microservice-based systems have not been evaluated. In this study, we analyze the case of Vendasta, a Canadian company that migrated to microservices two years ago and adopted the Accelerate metrics to monitor their development process. Our goal is to understand whether these metrics are beneficial in the microservices context from the practitioners' point of view. Therefore, we surveyed employees from different teams and obtained 62 responses. Our results show that the Accelerate metrics provide a good overview of the process issues and are particularly helpful for a high-level representation of the process performances. Furthermore, the Accelerate metrics also enabled the teams to improve their productivity, significantly reducing service outages.