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.—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—Mentions and links:Follow Nathen on LinkedIn or TwitterEngineering Enablement episode with Dr. Nicole Forsgren2022 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 StoreyJoin the DORA community for discussion and events: dora.community 

Nathen Harvey from DORA at Google shares key findings from the State of DevOps Report. Topics include user-centric software development, impact of documentation on software delivery, reemergence of the Elite cluster, and the role of AI in software delivery.

Head of Google Cloud's DORA team, Nathen Harvey, discusses the key findings from the 2023 DevOps report, including the impact of change approval processes and trunk-based development on software delivery performance. He also emphasizes the importance of organizational system design, leadership, and developer-led improvement for enhancing team performance and collaboration.

On the show this week, we’re talking updated DevOps practices for 2022 with hosts Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon and our guests Nathen Harvey and Derek DeBellis. Nathen and Derek start the show with a thorough discussion of DORA, the research program dedicated to helping organizations improve software delivery and operations, and the state of DevOps report that Google publishes every year. This year, the DevOps research team strengthened their focus on security and discovered that one of the biggest predictors in security practice adoption is company culture. Open, communicative, and trustful company cultures are some of the best for accepting and implementing optimized security practices. Derek tells us how company cultures are measured and scored for this purpose and Nathen talks about team and individual burnout and its affects on culture. Low, medium, high, and elite teams are another indicator of culture, and Nathen explains how teams earn their label through four keys of software delivery performance. Each year, they let the data show these four clusters of team performance. But this year there were only three, and Derek talks more about this phenomenon and why the elite cluster seems to have disappeared. When operational performance analysis was added, the four clusters reemerged and were renamed to better suit the new analysis metrics. Nathen details these four new clusters: starting, which performs neither well nor poorly and may be just starting out; flowing, teams that are performing well across throughput, stability, and operational performance; slowing teams, which don’t have high throughput but excel in other areas; and retiring teams, which are reliable but not actively developing projects. We discuss how companies may shift from one cluster to another and how much context can affect this shift. We talk about key findings in the 2022 DevOps report, especially in the security space. Some of the most notable include the adoption of DevOps security practices and the decreased incidence of burnout on teams who leverage security practices. Nathen and Derek elaborate on how this year’s research changed from last year and what remained the same. Nathen Harvey Nathen works with teams helping them learn about and apply the findings of our research into high performing teams. He’s been involved in the DevOps community for more than a decade. Derek DeBellis Derek is a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Google, where Derek focuses on survey research, logs analysis, and figuring out ways to measure concepts central to product development. Derek has published on Human-AI interaction, the impact of Covid-19’s onset on smoking cessation, designing for NLP errors and the role of UX in ensuring privacy. Cool things of the week Try out Cloud Spanner databases at no cost with new free trial instances blog Chipotle Is Testing More Artificial Intelligence Solutions To Improve Operations article Gyfted uses Google Cloud AI/ML tools to match tech workers with the best jobs blog Interview 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report blog DevOps site 2022 State of the DevOps Report Report site DORA site DORA Community site SLSA site Security Software Development Framework site Westrum organizational culture site Google finds culture, not tech, is the biggest predictor of DevOps security outcomes article GCP Podcast Episode 205: DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble podcast GCP Podcast Episode 284: State of DevOps Report 2021 with Nathen Harvey and Dustin Smith podcast GCP Podcast Episode 290: Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson podcast What’s something cool you’re working on? Steph is working on talks for DevFest Nantes and a Google Cloud dev conference in London. She’ll be talking about subsea fiber optics and Google Cloud networking products. Chloe is a Noogler, so she’s been working on learning as much as she can! She is excited to make her podcast debut this week! Hosts Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon

Nathen Harvey leads the DORA group at Google Cloud and shares key insights from the latest DORA report. He discusses the growing influence of AI on software stability and developer productivity. Nathen emphasizes the need for transformational leadership and highlights the challenges of measuring productivity, particularly with 'ghost engineers.' He also underlines the critical role of quality documentation in team success and the importance of setting specific goals for continuous improvement.