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Process Measures

3 min readStatus:Seedling

Core Idea

Process Measures quantify how software release and deployment processes themselves reflect architectural characteristics, particularly deployability and operational reliability.

What Are Process Measures?

Process Measures evaluate the characteristics of the software delivery pipeline:

  • Rather than the running system or its code structure
  • While Operational-Measures focus on runtime behavior and Structural-Measures assess code quality
  • Process Measures examine the mechanisms and workflows that get software from development to production

The fundamental question Process Measures answer is: “How effectively can we deliver changes to users?”

  • This encompasses deployment frequency, automation level, rollback capability, and the overall friction in the release process
  • These measures directly reflect architectural decisions about deployability—one of the critical Structural-Characteristics that determines how rapidly a system can evolve

Common Process Measures include:

Deployment Frequency:

  • How often can you deploy to production?
  • Daily deployments indicate high deployability
  • Quarterly releases suggest architectural constraints limiting changeability

Release Automation:

  • How many manual steps are required?
  • Manual deployments increase error rates and reduce reliability
  • The presence of manual steps often indicates architectural coupling that prevents automated testing and deployment

Rollback Capability:

  • Can you quickly revert a bad deployment?
  • The ability to roll back safely is both a deployability and reliability characteristic
  • Architectures requiring complex coordination across multiple components make rollbacks difficult or impossible

Lead Time for Changes:

  • How long from code commit to production?
  • Long lead times often indicate architectural bottlenecks like tightly coupled components requiring coordinated releases
  • Or manual testing dependencies that could be automated

These measures matter because they reveal architectural health:

  • An architecture claiming to support “continuous deployment” but requiring two-week release cycles due to manual testing dependencies has a structural problem, not just a process problem
  • The architecture itself prevents the desired characteristic

Why This Matters

Process Measures provide early warning signals of architectural decay:

  • When deployment frequency decreases over time, or when automation becomes harder to maintain
  • The architecture may be accumulating coupling and reducing modularity
  • These trends appear in process metrics before they become critical structural problems

Additionally, Process Measures connect architectural decisions to business outcomes:

  • Organizations competing on speed-to-market need architectures that support frequent, low-risk deployments
  • Process Measures make this requirement concrete and measurable
  • Enabling architects to demonstrate whether architectural investments deliver business value

By combining Process Measures with Operational-Measures and Structural-Measures:

  • Architects gain comprehensive visibility into whether their architecture actually supports its intended characteristics
  • Process Measures ensure that theoretical architectural properties translate into practical delivery capabilities

Sources

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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