Unpacking DORA’s State of DevOps Report | Nathen Harvey

**Nathen Harvey** (0:00)
I will tell this to leaders. Your team knows what hurts. Your team also knows how they can make that pain go away.
It's your role really to go and listen to them and then create that space and capacity in their roadmap, in their tooling, in their way of working to allow them to eliminate that friction.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:20)
The most iconic duos in tech, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Google's DORA team and LinearB, you heard that right, LinearB and Google Cloud are collaborating to explore the results from this year's 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps Report.
Gathered from over 33,000 global professionals, this annual report is your go-to for an independent view in the groundbreaking software team practices. Join DORA's Steve McGee, LinearB CTO Yashai Berry, and me, Dev Interrupted co-host Conor Bronsdon, for a workshop on November 8th as we guide you through the key findings from this year's report. Learn why teams with faster code reviews have an incredible 50% higher software delivery performance. Gain insight into the latest trends across industries and company size, and see the impact AI is having on team performance.
Mark your calendars for November 8th and prepare to elevate your DevOps game. Register now at linearb.io/events, or follow the link in the show notes. If the 8th doesn't work for you, no sweat. Register and we'll still send you the full recording after the fact. Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and I'm delighted to be joined by Nathen Harvey, head of Google's DORA team. Nathen, welcome to the show.

**Nathen Harvey** (1:31)
Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm super stoked to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:34)
It's going to be really fun to talk to you because you just released this year's 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps Report with a ton of new data.

**Nathen Harvey** (1:42)
Yes.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:42)
3.6 times as many people were surveyed, you said. It's really exciting to see that continued research grow.

**Nathen Harvey** (1:49)
Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. And when you talk about those 3.6 times more respondents that we have, there's a couple of things that led to that, I think.
One, it's sponsors like Linear B that help us come together and get the word out about the survey.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:02)
We're proud to be on it. It's the coolest initiative.

**Nathen Harvey** (2:04)
Yeah, we love that.
Another thing I think that's, it's kind of indicative of the momentum that DORA is seeing over the years.
You're seeing more respondents, we're seeing more vendors like yourselves putting together great developer productivity dashboards where you can get access to your DORA metrics very easily. I think the other thing from a surveying perspective, and this is a shout-out to our researchers, we looked at what happened last year and we had a lot of people start the survey, but fewer people finish it. And so we had to focus down, we had a hypothesis that maybe the reason they didn't finish last year was because the survey asked too many questions, it was too long. And so we set a hard limit for ourselves, we want to be able to make sure that a typical respondent can get through the survey this year in 15 minutes or less. And what we saw was that the rate of, we'll call them abandoned shopping carts, went down dramatically this year because of a shorter survey. So in this case, our hypothesis was borne out, it was pretty awesome.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:01)
That's fantastic to see. How much did you have to shrink the survey to do that?

**Nathen Harvey** (3:05)
Yeah, so each year we look at different capabilities.
And so we have to be very particular about which capabilities we look at. And then we have to figure out what are the best questions to ask about that capability. We want to ask enough questions that one, a question isn't asking you two things. Do you like the color red or yellow?
So, you know, you know, actually, yeah, but or or what if we asked, do you like the color red and yellow or or typically how we propose the questions are really statements and we give you a Likert scale, right? So I like the color red and yellow and you can lay out on a scale strongly disagree to strongly agree. Well, what if you like red but not yellow? How do you answer that question? Like, right. So we have to be very careful in our survey design.
How do we ask the questions? And then we have to make sure that we ask enough questions that we're really getting to the meat of the thing, right? Continuous integration is a good example of that. Do you do, like, my team practices continuous integration, strongly disagree to strongly agree. You can't ask that because what does continuous integration mean to you? What does it mean to me?