I’m thrilled to announce that Dustin Smith has joined DORA as an author on this year’s “Accelerate State of DevOps Report.” I met Dustin last year, when he joined me in a brainstorming session to discuss research ideas and design considerations. (If you peek back at the 2018 report, you’ll see him in the acknowledgments!) This year, his research and statistics background made a huge impact to the rigor of the report, in addition to his insights as a top-notch researcher. I can’t wait for you to see it. Stay tuned—the report comes out late August! ~Nicole
It’s a pleasure to introduce myself to the community! After contributing to the research design of last year’s report as a subject matter expert, it’s exciting to join forces with the DORA team and be a co-author of this year’s “Accelerate State of DevOps Report”! I’m a huge supporter of DORA’s data-driven approach and focus on factors such as culture, organizational policy and well-being, as opposed to metrics such as number of PRs and lines of code changed, which easily can be misunderstood or taken out of context.
During my tenure at Google I’ve studied developer workflows and experiences to help inform product and design teams. My background is in psychology with an emphasis on considering the systematic factors that influence an individual’s or team’s judgment and decision-making. I believe that people are influenced by their environmental constraints, and to help them be most effective, we need to understand those constraints.
This year’s report is packed with trends and new exciting findings. Be sure to check out the section on “What Really Works in Scaling Transformations” — it’s one of my favorites this year, and I led that analysis. It presents patterns we see among the highest performers, allowing teams and organizations to take an evidence-based approach to building and scaling their own DevOps transformation.
I look forward to sharing the results with you all soon!
