A masterclass on DORA – research program, common pitfalls, and future direction | Nathen Harvey (Google)

Nathen Harvey, who leads DORA at Google, explains what DORA is, how it has evolved in recent years, the common challenges companies face as they adopt DORA metrics, and where the program may be heading in the future.

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Discussion points:

(1:48) What DORA is today and how it exists within Google

(3:37) The vision for Google and DORA coming together

(5:20) How the DORA research program works

(7:53) Who participates in the DORA survey

(9:28) How the industry benchmarks are identified 

(11:05) How the reports have evolved over recent years

(13:55) How reliability is measured 

(15:19) Why the 2022 report didn’t have an Elite category

(17:11) The new Slowing, Flowing, and Retiring clusters

(19:25) How to think about applying the benchmarks

(20:45) Challenges with how DORA metrics are used

(24:02) Why comparing teams’ DORA metrics is an antipattern 

(26:18) Why ‘industry’ doesn’t matter when comparing organizations to benchmarks 

(29:32) Moving beyond DORA metrics to optimize organizational performance 

(30:56) Defining different DORA metrics

(36:27) Measuring deployment frequency at the team level, not the organizational level

(38:29) The capabilities: there’s more to DORA than the four metrics 

(43:09) How DORA and SPACE are related

(47:58) DORA’s capabilities assessment tool 

(49:26) Where DORA is heading

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Mentions and links:

Follow Nathen on LinkedIn or Twitter

Engineering Enablement episode with Dr. Nicole Forsgren

2022 State of DevOps report  

Bryan Finster’s How to Use & Abuse DORA Metrics (and Abi’s summary of the paper) 

Engineering Enablement episode with Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey

Join the DORA community for discussion and events: dora.community