ARTICLE

Take the temperature with the DORA Quick Check!

By Björn Bendix

Worried about running a fever in the cold autumn weather? At this time of year it's good to take the temperature of your team before filling next years backlog.

With the DORA Quick Check you'll get a very fast overview and some great suggestions on how to improve your software deliveries.

Who's DORA?!

Right, so. The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program is a research endevour ran by Google Cloud and they conduct research with the aim of improving organizational performance.

Their most known publication is the annual State of Devops report.

The origins of the survey/report harken back to 2013 and involved a mix of famous people like Gene Kim (the guy who co-wrote The Phoenix Project) and the company Puppet (which was aquired by Perforce in 2022) and while the DORA program now publishes their own State of Devops report under the Google Cloud banner, Perforce publishes their own paper annually. For a little more history, check out this link!

Onwards to the Check!

So what is the DORA Quick Check then? Well you may already have heard about the DORA metrics:

  • Deployment Frequency: How often an organization successfully releases to production.

  • Lead Time for Changes: The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production.

  • Change Failure Rate: The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.

  • Time to Restore Service: How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production.

These are all excellent metrics to track by any team that delivers software and they are also used as the first set of questions in the DORA Quick Check. Your answers will be measured against the respondents in the State of DevOps report and the check will give you an initial temperature of where you're at today. If you've already implemented DORA metrics, perhaps the result of the first Quick Check alone might spur your team to up their game against their peers!

But maybe you haven't really thought about DORA metrics (or heard of them before) and so you might feel a little lost on where to start improving.

The DORA Quick Check will then give you the chance to probe a little deeper by asking you further questions about your team/organization/workflow. The check will rate your responses concerning three common capabilities, which are often greatly beneficial to improve for any organization/team delivering software.

Wait - Capabilities?

Right, Capabilities. DORAs research model looks into a number of technical "capabilities". These are things such as:

  • Code maintainabilitiy.

  • Continuous integration.

  • Test automation.

  • Version control.

For each of these capabilities they've produced an associated article wherein the capability itself is described, how you go about implementing it, some common pitfalls etc. Basically all that you need to start improving in a given area.

So if you complete the full DORA Quick Check, you will get evaluated on three capabilities that DORA deem beneficial to anyone delivering software: Continuous Integration, Loosely Coupled Architecture, and Generative Organizational Culture.

These three capabilities are of course just a starting point in a quick check. You can explore all of their research model via their website here.

Ok, enough chit chat.

Go ahead and take the DORA Quick Check today and find out how well you're doing compared to your peers, find out ways you can improve or take some time to read through the State of Devops 2023 report.

Unless?

If you want to chat about DORA metrics or maybe more broadly about DevOps - get in touch with us at Lynchburg Collective. We're always interested in making your software development process more efficient!

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