DevOps Research and Assessment

DevOps Research and Assessment (abbreviated to DORA) is a team that is part of Google Cloud that engages in opinion polling of software engineers to conduct research for the DevOps movement.

The DORA team was founded by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. and conducted research for the DevOps company Puppet and later became an independent team (with Puppet continuing to produce reports by a new team).

Whilst the founding members have departed, the DORA team continue to publish research in the form of annual State of DevOps Reports.

State of DevOps Reports
The DORA team began publishing State of DevOps Reports in 2013. The latest DORA State of DevOps Report published in 2023 found culture and a customer centric focus key to success, whilst AI was providing limited benefits.

DORA Four Key Metrics
For the purposes of their research, Four Key Metrics, sometimes referred to as DORA Metrics, are used to assess the performance of teams.

The four metrics are as follows:
 * Change Lead Time - Time to implement, test, and deliver code for a feature (measured from first commit to deployment)
 * Deployment Frequency - Number of deployments in a given duration of time
 * Change Failure Rate - Percentage of failed changes over all changes (regardless of success)
 * Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) - Time it takes to restore service after production failure

Using these performance measures, the team are able to assess how practices (like outsourcing) and risk factors impact performance metrics for an engineering team. These metrics can be crudely measured using psychometrics or using commercial services.

Limitations
These metrics have been used by organisations to evaluate team-by-team performance, a use-case which the DORA team issued a warning against in October 2023.

Some professionals have argued that using the DORA Four Key Metrics as a target within engineering teams encourages focus on wrong incentives. For example; James Walker, CEO at Curiosity Software, has argued the "metrics aren’t a definitive route to DevOps success" and challenges in using them for team comparisons.

Research conducted by the computer scientist Junade Ali and the British polling firm Survation found that both software engineers (when building software systems) and public perception (when using software systems) found other factors mattered significantly more than the outcome measures which were treated as the "Four Key Metrics" (which ultimately measure the speed of resolving issues and the speed of fixing bugs, and are used to create the findings in the book), and risk and reward appetite varies from sector-to-sector.

Ali has also criticised the research on the basis that reputable opinion polling firms who comply with the rules of organisations like the British Polling Council should publish their full results and raw data tables, which the DORA team did not do - and additionally that the sponsors of the polling (Google Cloud and previously Puppet) create products which have a vested interest in having software engineers deliver faster (despite research indicating high levels of burnout amongst software engineers), which the results of the research ultimately supported. Despite the authors arguing that speed of delivery and software quality go hand-in-hand, Ali has offered several counter-examples; including the comparatively high quality of aviation software despite infrequent changes, contrasted with rapid application development being pioneered in the software that resulted in the British Post Office scandal and agile software development being used in the software responsible for the 2009–2011 Toyota vehicle recalls.

The software developer Bryan Finster has also discussed how, as correlation does not imply causation, organisations who are considered "high performing" in the research are not high performing because they focussed on the DORA metrics, but instead focussed on delivering value to users and arguing the metrics should be used as "trailing indicators for poor health, not indicators everything is going well".

Accelerate (book)
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations is a software engineering book co-authored by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim from their time in the DORA team. The book explores how software development teams using Lean Software and DevOps can measure their performance and the performance of software engineering teams impacts the overall performance of an organization.

The book discusses their research conducted as part of the DORA team for the annual State of DevOps Reports. In total, the authors considered 23,000 data points from a variety of companies of various different sizes (from start-up to enterprises), for-profit and not-for-profit and both those with legacy systems and those with modern systems.

24 Key Capabilities
The authors outline 24 practices to improve software delivery which they refer to as "key capabilities" and group them into five categories.

Continuous Delivery

 * Use Version Control for all Production Artifacts
 * Automate Your Deployment Process
 * Implement Continuous Integration
 * Use Trunk-Based Development Methods
 * Implement Test Automation
 * Support Test Data Management
 * Shift Left on Security
 * Implement Continuous Delivery (CD)

Architecture

 * Use a Loosely Coupled Architecture
 * Architect for Empowered Teams

Product and Process

 * Gather and Implement Customer Feedback
 * Make the Flow of Work Visible through the Value Stream
 * Work in Small Batches
 * Foster and Enable Team Experimentation

Lean Management and Monitoring

 * Have a Lightweight Change Approval Processes
 * Monitor across Application and Infrastructure to Inform Business Decisions
 * Check System Health Proactively
 * Improve Processes and Manage Work with Work-In-Process (WIP) Limits
 * Visualize Work to Monitor Quality and Communicate throughout the Team

Cultural

 * Support a Generative Culture
 * Encourage and Support Learning
 * Support and Facilitate Collaboration among Teams
 * Provide Resources and Tools that Make Work Meaningful
 * Support or Embody Transformational Leadership