DORA includes four key metrics for measuring delivery performance: lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change fail rate, and failed deployment recovery time. “DORA’s four key metrics, introduced in 2013, have become the industry standard for measuring software delivery performance,” Nathen Harvey, DORA lead and developer advocate at Google Cloud, and Derek DeBellis, senior quantitative UX researcher at Google, wrote in a blog post. 

This year, the report highlights the impact of AI, the growth of platform engineering, and the importance of developer experience. 

Impact of AI

When it comes to AI, 75.9% of respondents said they used AI for at least one of their daily tasks, the most popular being generating code, summarizing information, and getting explanations of their code. 

Some key benefits of AI included a 7.5% increase in documentation quality, a 3.4% increase in code quality, and a 3.1% increase in code review speed. The negatives of AI adoption were a decrease in delivery throughput by 1.5% and a 7.2% reduction in delivery stability. Additionally 39% of respondents had little to no trust in AI-generated code.

Google Cloud’s recommendations in this area include orienting AI adoption strategies around empowering employees and eliminating unwanted tasks, establishing clear AI use guidelines, and encouraging continuous exploration of AI tools. 

Growth of platform engineering

Platform engineering has seen significant adoption because it increases productivity for developers. 

The report found that this practice is currently most prevalent in larger companies, which signals that it is effective in managing complex development environments, Google Cloud explained.

The research also noted that companies might see an initial decrease in engineering team performance when a platform is first implemented, which will go away as improvements are made and the platform evolves. 

In order to see optimal results, companies should center their platform engineering strategy around user-centric design, developer independence, and a product-oriented approach. 

Developer experience remains key

And finally, the third major theme of the report was the importance of developer experience. A healthy developer culture can help reduce burnout, increase productivity, and increase job satisfaction. These claims are nothing new, but still held true in this year’s report. 

The “move fast and constantly pivot” approach was found to negatively affect developer well-being and performance, even when paired with strong leadership, comprehensive documentation, and a user-centric approach. 

“The key takeaway from the decade of research is that software development success hinges not just on technical prowess but also on fostering a supportive culture, prioritizing user needs, and focusing on developer experience,” the company wrote. 

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The new solution, underpinned by the ConnectALL platform it acquired in June 2023, gathers, organizes and evaluates disparate DORA and flow metrics to provide real-time, role-based dashboards to development teams, dev managers and organization leaders to use for informed decision-making.  

“By integrating and organizing data from diverse sources across the value chain, ValueOps Insights provides the information organizations need to make better business decisions,” said Jean-Louis Vignaud, Head of ValueOps in Broadcom’s Agile Operations Division. The ability to match investment with the capability to deliver products leads to “successful value realization,” the company noted in its announcement.

This enables monitoring of investment decisions against product outcomes, and confirmation that planned product capabilities translate into tangible investment outcomes. By aligning investment intent with execution capability, we help organizations ensure successful value realization.

DORA and Flow metrics are all about delivery efficiency, but Vignaud noted, “that doesn’t mean we’re smart in what we do. The ideal view of the word is, ‘I plan for value, I deliver value and I measure the value realization.” While the full vision for Insights includes a value planning tool that will be integrated in the next quarter, Vignuad said, “We can start to be a bit smarter because of Flow analytics and DORA metrics.”

To broaden the value proposition, Broadcom is working on value realization. As Vignaud explained, “We capture early metrics, ensuring that indeed you are realizing the value you said you would be realizing when you do the investment.” 

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The new dashboard currently has a waitlist, but is accessible to anyone with a free LinearB account. The dashboard also isn’t limited to a specific number of users or Git repositories. 

In addition to DORA Metrics, the free dashboard includes some other metrics as well, like merge frequency and pull request size. According to the company, these metrics can help teams predict performance and assess developer experience. 

There is also a paid version that offers additional benefits like a longer data retention period, look-back configurations, and more metrics, including resource allocation and project delivery. The additional metrics help team leaders map R&D investments to business priorities, as well as better forecast project deliverables, LinearB explained. 

“Our mission is to help every development team in the world become more operationally efficient and maximize their impact on the bottom line,” said Ori Keren, CEO and co-founder of LinearB. “Teams will never achieve elite performance without access to critical metrics that help them benchmark and measure their output against the rest of the industry. By offering DORA Metrics to the community for free, we give everyone the foundational visibility they need to improve their efficiency and align their work to business results.”

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The first-ever Engineering Benchmarks Report, recently released by software delivery management platform provider LinearB, provides insights from 1,500 organizations into what makes one DevOps team more effective than another, and what sets the top tier of development teams apart from the rest.

The four key DORA metrics look at deployment frequency, lead time for changes (cycle time), change failure rate, and mean time to recovery. Ori Keren, co-founder and CEO of LinearB, says those metrics helped DevOps teams move “from darkness to visibility.” 

But organizations that only track DORA metrics, he said, can miss the business implications of the software work being done. Keren explained: “I like this analogy to a car and an engine. The engine could be working fine, but you could be navigating this car in the wrong direction.” So DORA can show teams that they’re working efficiently, hitting all the metrics and humming like an engine, but Keren said you need to balance those with business metrics to know that you’re moving in the right direction.

Part of the problem, Keren said, is that DORA metrics are lagging indicators. The report noted that “acting on leading indicators and KPIs is more effective than missing [a goal] and backtracking to correct problems.” And some DORA metrics that are important to the engineering team might not be meaningful to the business, according to the report.

The study also lays out 10 benchmarks (see image at top) to define teams in terms of being elite, strong, fair, and needing focus on certain metrics. Included in those benchmarks is a line called planning accuracy. Keren explained that means if the organization is committing to certain things in a certain timeframe, how much of what was committed to was delivered. 

Among the data that somewhat surprised Keren is that elite organizations, which he expected would deliver on 100% of what they committed to in planning, are delivering only around 80%. And, he pointed out, most of the companies are not in that target area.

“But just the fact that we have those benchmarks and now [an organization] can check itself as to where it is, that’s the beginning of this big shift that you can start tracking, aiming in the right direction,” he said.

To begin to approach elite status, the report says that organizations should embed business goals in the team’s workflow, and anchor check-ins and recurring ceremonies around those goals. 

Then, he advised, before you plan your work, cut it to small chunks that you can move quickly through the development process. 

Finally, Keren said it is important to reduce the friction that exists in the development life cycle, and Keren said that more automation in those areas is key. “With things like generative AI, code is being written fast. But the process of orchestrating everything that needs to happen to the code from when it’s written until reaching production, all those phases are definitely where more automation can help.”

By bringing Agile and DevOps practices, as well as value stream management and business agility, into strategic planning, teams can modernize their development processes and become elite engineering organizations.

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The Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 is the 6th annual report from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), which was acquired by Google Cloud in January of this year.The report represents six years of research and data from over 31,000 professionals worldwide.  

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According to DORA, the research revalidated that best technical practices, cloud adoption, effective organizational practices and productive culture are driving DevOps forward. This dramatically increased the proportion of elite performers, a group that was  introduced in last year’s report, and decreasing the proportion of low performers. 

“What this tells us is that elite performance is possible for anyone that requires executing on capabilities. How you get better is by executing on the principles of continuous delivery and by doing all of the things in that predictive model,” Nicole Forsgren, from DORA founder, and lead for research and strategy at Google Cloud, told SD Times. 

The report also found that the cloud continues to be a differentiator for elite performers, and that they were 24 times more likely than low performers to execute on all five capabilities of cloud computing. Their lead time from committing to deploying is 106 times faster and they have a 7 times lower change failure rate than low performers. 

Forsgren added another key finding is that the use of open source among top performers continues to be a strong pattern. Proprietary systems are really only used among low performers because the cost of the systems are so high and the community that knows how to use them is very restricted. 

“If you have a question you can’t go anywhere else to find these if you need to hire. Developers for these systems. It’s such a restrictive community in contrast open-source systems are really leveraged among the high performers,” said Forsgren. “If we’re leveraging an open-source platform we already have a better community to draw from. And as an interesting side note it also gives us better recruiting opportunities.” 

Also for the first time, the report found that enterprise organizations with more than 5,000 employees are lower performers than those with fewer than 5,000 employees. Heavyweight process and controls, as well as tightly coupled architectures, are some of the reasons that result in slower speed and the associated instability. Meanwhile, the highest performers focused on structural solutions that build community.

“Organizations ask what’s the best way to scale. And they want to find a silver bullet. They want to think about one place they can throw their money and that can be the nice way or the easy way,” Forsgren said. “So many of them find the best success is using structural solutions that build community. This allows them to have communities in place that are resilient to reorganize and product changes.”

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“The best, most innovative organizations develop and deliver their software faster, more reliably, more securely, and with higher quality, standing as high performers in technology,” said Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist of DORA. “We are excited to join a team committed to delivering research-backed DevOps practices, and we look forward to continuing our work to understand key capabilities, measure value-driven outcomes, and optimize processes to help teams deliver their software as they move to the cloud.”

Automation Anywhere launches a mobile app for RPA
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) company Automation Anywhere has announced a mobile app for securely managing RPA bots built using its intelligent RPA platform. According to the company, the app will expand the reach of RPA in the enterprise.

“It’s estimated that individuals spend an average of four hours a day on their mobile devices,” said Abhijit Kakhandiki, senior vice president, Products and Engineering for Automation Anywhere.  “The ability to control bots and manage the entire digital workforce from a mobile device, always within easy reach, is a gamechanger.”

NVIDIA to open robotics research lab in Seattle
NVIDIA has announced that it is opening a new robotics research lab near the University of Washington in Seattle. The purpose of the lab is to drive robotics research to enable a next generation of robots that will be able to perform complex manipulation tasks and safely work among humans.

According to NVIDIA, about 50 research scientists, faculty visitors, and student interns will conduct research at the lab. “In the past, robotics research has focused on small, independent projects rather than fully integrated systems. We’re bringing together a collaborative, interdisciplinary team of experts in robot control and perception, computer vision, human-robot interaction, and deep learning,” said Dieter Fox, senior director of robotics research at NVIDIA and professor in the UW Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

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The 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey report comes from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in collaboration with Google Cloud. About 1,900 professionals worldwide participated in this year’s study. The report is designed to find what issues matter the most to technical professionals and find new ways organizations and teams can improve. The survey looks at IaaS and PaaS, monitoring and observability, databases, testing, workflow, culture, security and reliability.

“Our goal is to help organizations understand how they can be high performers,” said Dr. Nicole Forsgren, founder and CEO of DORA. “We are at the state of work that drives technology transformations and changes the world. This year’s survey builds on the last four years of work to give us the most comprehensive view of IT impacts on the industry yet.”

According to DORA, this is the first time in five years the research is expanding to include availability. “This addition improves our ability to explain and predict organizational outcomes and forms a more comprehensive view of developing, delivering, and operating software. We call this new construct software delivery and operational performance, or SDO performance. This new analysis allows us to offer even deeper insight into DevOps transformations,” the report states. When it comes to SDO performance, DORA finds it unlocks competitive advantages such as profitability, productivity, market share, customer satisfaction and completed mission goals.

To capture SDO performance, the team looked at global outcomes rather than output. The four main measures of SDO performance the report looks at are deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service and change fail rate. When looking deeper into teams, the report found high, medium and low performers. This is the first year the data showed a fourth high-performance group: elite performers. “This new category exists for two reasons. The first is that we see the high-performing group growing and expanding, suggesting the overall industry is improving its software development and delivery practices,” according to the report. “The second is that the elite group demonstrates that the bar for excellence is evolving across the industry, with the highest performers still optimizing for throughput and stability.” Elite performers are more likely to deploy on-demand and take less than one hour for lead time changes. In comparison, high performances deploy between once per hour and once per day and take between one day and one week to make changes. Low-performing teams deploy between once a week and once a month and take between one to six months to make changes. In addition, the elite performers deploy code 46 time more than low performers, and 2,555 times faster. They have a 7 times lower change failure rate and are 2,604 times faster to recover from incidents.

When it comes to availability, which in this report means ability to make and keep promises and assertions on a software product or service, the report found availability correlated with the performance profiles. Elite performances are 3.55 times more likely to have strong availability practices, for example.

The report also found organizational performance is measured through profitability, productivity, market share, number of customers, satisfaction and quality of services. In addition, organizations have goals of improving quality, and can measure those through time spent on manual work, unplanned work or rework, security remediations and customer-support work. “Our analysis shows that high performers do significantly less manual work across all vectors, spend more time doing new work, and spend less time remediating security issues or defects than their low-performing counterparts. Because they build quality in, they spend less time fixing problems downstream, freeing up more time to do value-add work,” the report states.

Another interesting finding was how organizations implement cloud infrastructure has a big impact on performance. For instance, the report found teams that adopt essential cloud characteristics are 23 times more likely to be characterized as elite performers. The five essential characteristics of cloud computing are: On-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.

“A stunning finding in the data this year is the compelling case of doing cloud right. Adopting essential cloud characteristics drives high performance and differentiates the highest performers from those who may say they are in the cloud, but are unable to realize performance gains because their technology and processes aren’t executed correctly.”

When looking at open-source software, the report found it is 1.75 times more likely to be used by higher performers, who are also 1.5 times more likely to expand open-source usage in the future. “Over the last two decades, open source software has become widely adopted. In our survey, 58 percent of respondents agreed that their team made extensive use of open source components, libraries, and platforms, with over 50 percent agreeing that their team planned to expand use of open source software,” according to the report.

Surprisingly, the report did find that outsourcing by function hurts performance. Lower-performing teams were 4 times more likely to outsource whole functions such as testing or operations than higher-performing teams.

Other key findings were that technical practices such as monitoring, observability and continuous testing drive high performance, and industry doesn’t matter when it comes to achieving high performance for software delivery.

In addition to Google Cloud, other sponsors of the report included: Amazon Web Services, CA Technologies, CloudBees, Datical, Deloitte, Electric Cloud, GitLab, IT Revolution, Microsoft, PagerDuty, Pivotal, Redgate, Sumo Logic, Tricentis, and XebiaLabs.

“Incorporating DevOps is becoming a mandate if you want to improve performance, productivity, and value,” said Bill Briggs, global CTO of Deloitte Consulting LLP.  “The annual State of DevOps Report reinforces the importance of learning how to deliver technology differently in today’s world—from how you utilize open source to implementing cloud to best practices around testing, change management and security.”

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The middle performers were doing less automation of  processes for change management, testing, deployment and change approval, explained Alanna Brown, senior product marketing manager at Puppet, which presented the report along with DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment).  “These groups have already begun automation, and are seeing benefits,” she said. “But that reveals technical debt that they didn’t realize before they started, which is a normal phase of the [DevOps] journey. It’s a J curve; the initial performance is high, but then it gets worse before it gets better again.”

Another measure of successful DevOps implementations is leadership. Transformational leaders have a clear understanding of the organization’s vision, communicate in a way that inspires and motivates, challenge their teams through intellectual stimulation, are supportive, thoughtful and caring of others, and are generous with praise, according to Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist at DORA. “It’s hard to measure the impact of leaders because they’re not doers or practitioners, but still they have a big influence over teams and architecture,” she said.

Looking at the impact of IT performance on overall organizational performance, the report found, not surprisingly, that high IT performance (as measured in throughput of code and stability of systems) results in organizational success in faster time to markets, improved experiences for the customer and the ability to respond quickly to changes in the market.

The report found that loosely coupled architectures and teams result in higher IT performance. The adoption of lean product management techniques also factors in.  “There is no longer a ‘done’ in software,” Puppet’s Brown said. “Teams are working in small batches, making their work visible and using feedback to inform design.”

Jez Humble, one of the founders of DORA, tied in the ways teams are set up with IT performance and organizational success. “Does allowing teams to make their own tool choices and change systems predict an ability to do continuous delivery? Can they do testing on demand, without relying on other teams or services? Do teams have the autonomy to get work done without fine-grained collaboration with other teams?” These factors, he said, impact whether or not an organization can ensure their software is always deployable.

As for system stability and resilience, Humble measures these by how long it takes to restore the system after an outage, or what proportion of changes lead to outages or degradation of quality of service.

To Humble, the important question in measuring success of a DevOps implementation is, “Can you deploy software on demand, during business hours, at any point of the life cycle?”

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