Engineering Enablement by DX

Nathen Harvey explains how DORA has evolved in recent years, the common challenges companies face as they adopt DORA metrics, and where the program may be heading in the future.

Show Notes

Nathen Harvey, who leads DORA at Google, explains what DORA is, how it has evolved in recent years, the common challenges companies face as they adopt DORA metrics, and where the program may be heading in the future.

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Discussion points:

(1:48) What DORA is today and how it exists within Google
(3:37) The vision for Google and DORA coming together
(5:20) How the DORA research program works
(7:53) Who participates in the DORA survey
(9:28) How the industry benchmarks are identified 
(11:05) How the reports have evolved over recent years
(13:55) How reliability is measured 
(15:19) Why the 2022 report didn’t have an Elite category
(17:11) The new Slowing, Flowing, and Retiring clusters
(19:25) How to think about applying the benchmarks
(20:45) Challenges with how DORA metrics are used
(24:02) Why comparing teams’ DORA metrics is an antipattern 
(26:18) Why ‘industry’ doesn’t matter when comparing organizations to benchmarks 
(29:32) Moving beyond DORA metrics to optimize organizational performance 
(30:56) Defining different DORA metrics
(36:27) Measuring deployment frequency at the team level, not the organizational level
(38:29) The capabilities: there’s more to DORA than the four metrics 
(43:09) How DORA and SPACE are related
(47:58) DORA’s capabilities assessment tool 
(49:26) Where DORA is heading

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Mentions and links:
Follow Nathen on LinkedIn or Twitter
Engineering Enablement episode with Dr. Nicole Forsgren
2022 State of DevOps report  
Bryan Finster’s How to Use & Abuse DORA Metrics (and Abi’s summary of the paper) 
Engineering Enablement episode with Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey

Join the DORA community for discussion and events: dora.community 

Creators and Guests

Host
Abi Noda
Abi is the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com), which helps engineering leaders measure and improve developer experience. Abi formerly founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub.

What is Engineering Enablement by DX?

The show focused on developer productivity and the teams and leaders dedicated to improving it. Each episode features in-depth interviews with Platform and DevEx teams, along with the latest research and approaches for measuring developer productivity. Presented by DX (getdx.com), the developer intelligence platform designed by researchers.