Platform Engineering Maturity Assessment

Developer Experience (DX): How well the platform reduces cognitive load and friction for product engineers. Automation: How much of the software delivery lifecycle is automated — builds, tests, deployments, rollbacks. Observability: How well teams can understand what their systems are doing in production (metrics, logs, traces, alerting). Security: How early and consistently security controls are applied across the platform. Self-Service: How much teams can provision infrastructure, environments, and services without opening tickets or waiting for platform team help.

Level 1 — Reactive: Platform engineering is ad-hoc. Individuals heroically solve problems but there is no standardization. Level 2 — Repeatable: Core practices exist and are documented but adoption is inconsistent. Level 3 — Scalable: Practices are standardized, enforced, and adopted across most teams. Platform team focuses on enablement. Level 4 — Optimizing: Continuous improvement loops, data-driven decision making, and developer experience metrics drive all platform investments.

Run the assessment at the start of each quarter to track progress, before and after major platform initiatives to measure impact, and when onboarding new leadership to establish a baseline. Share results with your engineering leaders to align on investment priorities. A good target cadence is quarterly with a full team retrospective twice a year.

Focus on the top 3 recommendations shown after the assessment. Each recommendation targets your lowest-scoring dimensions. Start with one concrete initiative per quarter — trying to improve all dimensions simultaneously rarely works. Common first steps: if DX is weak, start a developer satisfaction survey and internal developer portal; if Automation is weak, standardize your CI pipeline with a golden path template; if Security is weak, implement SAST in your default CI workflow.

The radar (spider) chart shows your score for each of the 5 dimensions on a 0–3 scale (matching the Not Started / Basic / Intermediate / Advanced radio options). Each axis represents one dimension. A perfectly balanced, fully filled pentagon means Advanced on all dimensions. Gaps in the chart reveal which dimensions lag behind. The chart is drawn with SVG and updates in real-time as you answer questions — no external libraries required.