Taking the next step on your DevOps journey

Evidence-based solutions to help improve your team’s performance

By @jezhumble and Riona MacNamara

How can you transform how your organization delivers and manages software? It’s not just about the tools you use. For six years, DORA’s State of DevOps research program has been investigating the factors that drive high performance in technology delivery and organizational outcomes. Now, we’re using that research to help you understand exactly where and how your organization can improve.

At the heart of the research program are four key metrics that measure software delivery performance. The first two are measures of throughput or tempo, and the last two are measures of stability:

• Lead time for changes: How long does it take to get changes from being committed to version control to running in production?
• Deploy frequency: How often do you deploy to production or release to end users?
• Change fail rate: What percentage of changes to production or releases to users result in degraded service and subsequently require remediation?
• Time to restore: How long does it generally take to restore service when a service incident or a defect that impacts users occurs?

Analysis of over 31,000 responses from thousands of organizations worldwide have consistently shown that high performers do not trade off throughput against stability: instead, the best teams — even in large, highly regulated organizations — achieve high levels of both throughput and stability. Further, we’ve found that software delivery performance predicts organizational performance: our highest performers are twice as likely to meet or exceed their organizational performance goals, including profitability, productivity, market share, operating efficiency, number of customers, customer satisfaction, and the ability to achieve organizational and mission goals. Your ability to deliver software with speed and stability matters to your organization.

DORA has identified 34 key DevOps capabilities that drive improvements to these metrics — capabilities that describe not only your architecture and technical practices, but also your organization’s culture and approach to management and leadership. But every organization has its own context and strategy, and there’s no single path to success. So where do you start?

This week we’ve launched a set of evidence-based solutions that not only help you understand how your organization performs, but also suggests capabilities we think you should focus on to begin your transformation.

First, use the extended quick check tool to see how your organization’s performance compares to industry benchmarks. The tool will also identify which capabilities you should prioritize in order to improve your performance against the four key metrics.

Then, check out our detailed guidance. To supplement the recommendations, we’ve written detailed solutions for all the DevOps capabilities recommended by the tool. These cover key DevOps practices and technologies (trunk-based development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, architecture, continuous testing, cloud infrastructure) and measurement (monitoring and observability). They also provide actionable insights into the cultural and process changes that drive transformation, including an organizational culture that recognizes the importance of working in small batches, prioritizing code maintainability and work in process limits, and promotes continuous learning.

These solutions describe how each capability drives improved performance, and provide actionable guidance on how to implement these in your organization. If the recommendations of the quick check tool don’t resonate with you — and every organization is different, so they won’t be right for everyone — check out the other capabilities we’ve written up from previous years. You can discover and explore these capabilities and the wider research program, along with six years of State of DevOps reports, at https://devops-research.com/research.html. Don’t miss our guide to implementing organizational transformation, and our white paper describing how to calculate the return on investment from a DevOps transformation.

We hope you’ll find something that inspires you to take the next step on your DevOps journey, wherever you’re starting from.