This paper investigates the impact of a KPI driven DevOps adoption initiative within a large scale financial organisation. Existing literature has studied the benefits and challenges of DevOps adoption, revealing the opportunities to increase the pace of software delivery and quality, whilst recognising the importance of culture as part of any change process. However, whilst DevOps metrics are widely promoted in industry, their effectiveness as KPIs and their impact on performance and developer behaviour remain unclear. Related studies of metrics use in the software industry have suggested adoption can have unintended impacts on practitioner behaviours, particularly when used for KPIs. To investigate the impact of DevOps metrics adoption, we conducted a case study within a business area of a large financial organisation. We employed a mixed-methods approach, combining a semi-structured interview with leadership, quantitative analysis of 1074 projects undergoing the adoption, and a survey of 17 developers capturing both attitudinal and behavioural insights. The results reveal improvements in key performance metrics but also highlight contrasts between managerial intent and developer perception, including concerns around metric gaming, pressure from ranking systems, and inconsistent understanding of targets. The findings contribute empirical evidence to the DevOps literature and emphasise the importance of aligning measurement systems with practical realities and cultural context to drive meaningful improvement.

@inproceedings{PeacockS26,
  title = {Beyond the Numbers: Evaluating DevOps Adoption in an Enterprise Software Development Organisation},
  author = {Callum Peacock and Tim Storer},
  booktitle = {FSE},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3803437.3805247}
}