Source: DORA
Like many in the DevOps community, we are big fans of the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team. Who isn’t?! In fact, Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim are both strategic advisors for CloudBees, and we always love collaborating with Jez Humble (stay tuned for our webinar with him in October).
This year, in collaboration with Google Cloud, DORA released their latest research findings in their 2018 report “Accelerate: State of DevOps: Strategies for a New Economy .” As sponsors of the report, CloudBees was thrilled to see 1,900 technical professionals worldwide participate in this year's study, contributing to research findings that drive excellence in the industry and allow organizations to generate powerful business outcomes by leveraging technology.
With so many organizations now making 'big bets' on DevOps to help them remain competitive, the 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report is an incredible resource to help teams understand where and how to invest their time and energy to improve software delivery performance. We are proud to support DORA, and are pleased to see that CloudBees’s industry-leading approach to enabling continuous delivery, self-service practices, and driving more effective cloud adoption aligns with the key findings from the report and those characteristics found in high and elite performing organizations.
So, how does your organization stack up?
The ability to leverage high-value software delivery performance is a key differentiator for organizations. According to the report, “those that develop and deliver quickly are better able to experiment with ways to increase customer adoption and satisfaction, pivot when necessary, and keep up with compliance and regulatory demands.” And yes, any team in any industry, whether subject to a high degree of regulatory compliance or not – across all industry verticals – has the ability to achieve a high degree of software delivery performance!
Source: DORA
One of our favorite takeaways this year is that the measures of throughput and stability enable one another – and are not tradeoffs. According to the report, “For the fifth year in a row, cluster analysis shows statistically significant differences in both throughput and stability measures among our performance profiles, with the highest performers excelling at all aspects of throughput and stability, and medium and low performers falling behind.
Source: DORA
What is also interesting is the newest measurement added to the software delivery performance model – availability. Availability is all about ensuring a product or service is also available to, and can be accessed by, your end users. Things like how teams learn and adapting from outages, and how well feedback loops are connected are critical to performance. “Analysis showed the availability measures are significantly correlated with software delivery performance profiles, and elite and high performers consistently reported superior availability, with elite performers being 3.55 times more likely to have strong availability practices.”
Automation is Key to DevOps Success
One significant organizational performance metric that can impact availability is manual work. Leveraging automation for repetitive tasks or tasks organizations can parallelize (and therefore speed up), can improve work quality, repeatability and consistency to free teams from spending time on low-value tasks. According to the report, “with more work automated, high performers free their technical staff to do innovative work that adds real value to their organizations.” We are all aware of how painful manual work can be, so it is no surprise that once work is automated, it’s much less painful and tends to disappear from people’s attention. Continuing from the report, “when we compare high performers to their lower-performing peers, we find that elite and high performers are doing less manual work than their lower-performing peers at statistically significant levels on all dimensions, while medium performers have the highest amount of manual work on all dimensions.” See the j-curve of transformation below and see how this reflects your organization’s transformation journey.
Source: DORA
"Our research provides compelling evidence that smart investments in technology, process, and culture drive profit, quality, and customer outcomes that are important for organizations to stay competitive and relevant -- both today and as we look to the future," said Dr. Nicole Forsgren, co-founder and CEO of DORA. Some more of this year's Report found key findings in the areas of:
Software delivery and availability unlocks competitive advantages. Those include increased profitability, productivity, market share, customer satisfaction, and the ability to achieve organization goals.
How you implement cloud infrastructure matters. The cloud improves software delivery performance but teams that leverage all of cloud computing's essential characteristics are 23 times more likely to be high performers.
Open source software improves performance. Open source software is 1.75 times more likely to be extensively used by the highest performers, who are also 1.5 times more likely to expand open source usage in the future.
Outsourcing by function is rarely adopted by elite performers and hurts performance. While outsourcing can save money and provide a flexible labor pool, low-performing teams are almost 4 times as likely to outsource whole functions such as testing or operations than their highest-performing counterparts.
Key technical practices drive high performance. These include monitoring and observability, continuous testing, database change management, and integrating security earlier in the software development process.
There is so much more insight and data to unpack from this year’s Accelerate State of DevOps Report, make sure you download the full report today and learn what makes or breaks a high performing organization!
DOES18 USA Will Be Here Before You Know It! Be sure to join Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim and our partners at IT Revolution for the next DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas! The DORA team will continue to highlight their top takeaways from the event and there’s no doubt they’ll be sharing more data as they continue to rub science on DevOps!
See the full schedule here and register now before it’s too late!
BONUS!
Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) Podcast Episode 90: Gene Kim and DOES18 Speakers – watch the replay here: https://electric-cloud.com/blog/2018/08/c9d9-podcast-e90-does18/
Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) Podcast Episode 91: Gene Kim and DOES18 Speakers – mark your calendars for this special episode featuring Dr. Nicole Forsgren!
Read our recent Q&A with Dr. Nicole Forsgren! https://electric-cloud.com/blog/2018/05/accelerate-state-of-devops-report-qa-with-dr-nicole-forsgren-dora-ceo/
Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops Webinar Featuring Gene Kim and Anders Wallgren. Watch the replay here: https://electric-cloud.com/resources/webinars/bridging-the-gap-between-dev-and-ops/