DevOps Process Excellence Assessment

Weekly assessment of every person ensures the organization achieves and maintains framework maturity!

While other frameworks rely on team-level retrospectives or voluntary feedback mechanisms, SADMF recognizes that organizational maturity can only be achieved when every person is individually assessed, ranked, and held accountable for their framework knowledge. The Assessment is not optional, not anonymous, and not open to interpretation. It is the heartbeat of continuous improvement, pulsing once per week to ensure that no drift in process adherence goes undetected.

The Assessment consists of two components:

  • Self-Reported Compliance Survey — 200 questions covering every aspect of SADMF practice
  • Framework Knowledge Examination — a 45-minute timed test of memorized framework material

Self-Reported Compliance Survey

The Self-Reported Compliance Survey contains 200 questions that cover every aspect of SADMF practice, from branching procedures to ceremony attendance to proper use of the Release Tracking spreadsheet. Each question requires the respondent to rate their own adherence on a scale from 1 (Aspirational) to 5 (Exemplary).

Respondents are expected to be honest. To encourage honesty, all responses are reviewed by the DevOps Usage & Compliance Head Engineer (DOUCHE) and cross-referenced against ceremony attendance logs, commit histories, and PeopleWare records.

Discrepancies between self-reported scores and observed behavior are flagged as Integrity Gaps and are treated more seriously than low compliance scores. An engineer who does not follow the process is merely untrained, but an engineer who misrepresents their adherence is untrustworthy.

Framework Knowledge Examination

The Framework Knowledge Examination is a 45-minute timed test that gauges how much of the SADMF material each person has memorized. The test covers:

  • Role definitions and ceremony sequences
  • Metric formulas and principle statements

Questions are drawn from the official SADMF Body of Knowledge (SADBOK), which is updated quarterly by the Admiral’s Transformation Office (ATO).

The test is intentionally closed-book. The ability to look up information when needed is not a substitute for having internalized it. A Code Engineer who must consult documentation to remember the Fractal-based Development branching rules will inevitably make errors during the time it takes to look them up. Memorization eliminates this latency and ensures that framework adherence is reflexive rather than deliberate.

Excellence Score and Bell Curve

Assessment results are compiled into an individual Excellence Score, which is plotted on a mandatory bell curve. The bell curve ensures that regardless of how well the organization performs in absolute terms, a fixed percentage of individuals will be identified as underperformers.

This is by design. The purpose of the bell curve is not to punish low performers but to ensure that the organization never becomes complacent. If every person scored in the top tier, the Assessment would fail to differentiate — and differentiation is the foundation of accountability.

Score outcomes are as follows:

  • Bottom 10% — automatically referred to the Tribunal for review; Excellence Scores are appended to their PeopleWare profiles as permanent records
  • Top 10% — receive a certificate of recognition, which is also permanent but carries no tangible benefit beyond the certificate itself

Organizational Maturity Impact

The Assessment feeds directly into the SADMF Maturity Score, which aggregates individual Excellence Scores into an organization-wide metric. The System of Authority (SOA) uses the Maturity Score to identify teams that require additional coaching, process reinforcement, or restructuring.

Teams with consistently low Maturity Scores may be dissolved and their members redistributed through the Press Gang ceremony, on the theory that low performance is contagious and must be quarantined before it spreads.

The Assessment is the single most important practice in the framework, because without measurement, improvement is merely a wish.

See Also