✅ Score your development team
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Enjoy the 94th Podup, with special thanks to Deel.
Today, we’ll dive into the best insights and ideas from Lenny’s Podcast.
Who can say they've experienced major delays with a software project? Almost all of us. But who can confidently measure the performance of their development teams? Far fewer of us.
Nicole Forsgren is a DevOps expert and a Partner at Microsoft Research. She shares the essential metrics introduced by DORA to assess and improve software development performance.
Metrics to measure
DORA has defined 4 software development performance metrics to evaluate teams:
Lead time. How long do you take to get from code committed to code running in production?
Deployment frequency. How often do you deploy code?
Mean time to restore. If something happens, how long does it take for you to recover?
Change fail rate. For every change that is pushed, what percentage of incidents require human intervention?
Nicole Forsgren
Speed and stability synergies
What's interesting is these metrics move in tandem. When you move faster, your code becomes more stable. You push smaller changes more often, resulting in a smaller blast radius.
Conversely, moving slowly leads to more unstable systems. You push larger batch changes which have a more substantial blast radius, making it harder to debug.
Nicole Forsgren
How performant is your team?
DORA has benchmarks for elite performers:
Lead time: Take less than a day
Deployment frequency: Deploy on demand
Time to restore: Less than an hour
Change fail rate: Between 0-15%
Many teams will argue that these benchmarks aren't applicable to them. Whether it's large companies pointing to more complex codebases or small companies complaining about fewer resources, my stance is clear: pick your excuse. These benchmarks are relevant for both large and small companies.
Nicole Forsgren
Why it matters
'Move fast and break things' should be renamed 'Move fast and make things'. It corrects the misconception that rapid development leads to more tech debt.
DORA's insights reveal that agile teams tend to build more stable products. By embracing these metrics, you can create a more efficient development process and foster an agile culture within your team.
Next steps
You can use DORA’s free tool to:
Assess your team against industry benchmarks
Gain predictive insights into the constraints you're most likely facing
Use these insights to guide your team on where to focus and how to improve
Your thoughts?
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