Guests: Steven Kim (LinkedIn) | Nathen Harvey (LinkedIn)
Companies: Qarik Group (Twitter) | DORA (Twitter) | Google Cloud (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Technology drives value in innovation across organizations and there are proven ways to measure and improve how teams accomplish software delivery and operations performance. DORA aka  DevOps Research and Assessment has been running a survey for over 8 years to feel the pulse of industry and they are back with their latest survey. 

The latest survey is underway and it seeks data on four key metrics to measure software delivery performance:

• Change lead time – how long does it take for your team to get changes into production? 
• Deployment frequency – how frequently are you doing that?
• Change failure rate – how frequently are those changes causing a failure or interrupting your customers’ experience?
• Time to restore service – when you do have an outage or an incident, how quickly does your team react and respond and restore that service to our users?

[Note: Please take this survey]

The survey also asks about the different capabilities that drive the performance of those key metrics such as if respondents are using any version control system, what does their automation look like and so on. It also tries to understand the culture or process at the organization and seek answers to questions such as what kind of change approval process they have and how much work they have in process at any given time. The survey also looks at how teams prioritize a specific task, how they collaborate with each other and when there is a failure what lessons do they take from it.

Nathen Harvey, Developer Advocate at DORA and Google Cloud, says, “DORA recognizes that this is a journey of continuous improvement and improving does not mean throwing new tools at the problem all the time. It’s about people. The people in the system (developers, operators, QA testers, security folks, etc.) matter more than anything else and the survey wants to get to the heart of their lived experience and understand what that tells us.”

Qarik CTO Steven Kim says that he himself took the survey and it benefits everyone in the ecosystem. “The survey can be an effective conversation piece about where an organization can start to explore and gather input toward a productive goal,” adds Kim, “It can identify areas where your team is doing really well and areas where it has opportunities to improve or had not even thought about.”

Harvey says organizations take the survey, see the DORA metrics, and use them to help drive conversations. But then, what comes next? A coach and a partner like Qarik can come in and help the team start their improvement journey.

Per Kim, the Qarik model has always been to embed and work with the organization, i.e., it employs lighthouse pilot models to prove hypotheses. It runs through a DORA-oriented workshop with the organization, takes baseline measurements of where they are, what targets they might be considering, and works towards specific things to start moving the needle on the metrics that are important to them.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory & Swapnil Bhartiya