I’ve read the 2023 DORA State of DevOps report & summarized parts I found interesting. In a hurry, just read this bulleted list.
- Diversity: Underrepresented individuals have 24% more burnout & women or those who self-describe their gender have 40%. 😢
- User-Centric: 1 thing you can do to improve your performance by 40%: focusing on the user, learning what they need, aligning your team to meet those needs, & taking that feedback to prioritize your work.
- Code Reviews: Speed up your software delivery by 50%: make code reviews faster.
- Documentation: High-quality documentation affects all aspects of technical execution positively, for new & experienced employees
- Cloud: Huge benefits to organizational performance, but key is to allow devs to leverage the flexibility vs. having restrictive controls.
- Balance: Software Delivery & Operational Performance need to be balanced; go too far with one knob leads to burn out.
- AI: helps AND hurts.
- CICD: Still best thing to improve all aspects of your software delivery, team well being, organizational and operational performance.
Burnout (page 51): Distribution of work helps solve burnout for women & those who self-described gender, but not underrepresented groups.
User-Centric: Her majesty & I debated what “user-centric” means. Her point, which I agree, is simply responding to user requests vs. actually having them test what you built isn’t truly user-centric, just user focused. My counter was I feel ANY amount of user feedback that directly affects your daily work that you planned to do “because we got feedback from users we interpreted” to me counts (p17)
Documentation (p27): I think I took for granted how good documentation helps everyone; great reminder. The flip-side, not EVERYONE experiences DOING documentation the same way (see diversity & work distribution).
Cloud (p38): If you give devs AWS but they can’t easily create/destroy things, it’s not helpful, hurts performance.
Chapter 1’s (p10) 4 team types of User-Centric, Feature-Driven, Developing, & Balanced gave me a wonderful perspective change & metaphor of “adjust these dials, but not too far to avoid burn out” (page 16)
AI: Helps, including juniors, lowers team & software delivery performance. We’re all still figuring this out.
CICD: Another year, another confirmation this is how you do software well. If you do not want to do software well, then don’t do these practices. I continue to meet people who think development practices are “opinions” and none of them contribute to high quality software. This is incorrect, the data for years has shown, and shows they massively contribute, so I’m happy DORA keeps re-evaluating these practices with different lenses each year.
Loosely coupled architecture massively lowers burnout & makes you more productive and happy.
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