Applying DORA in Your Context

January 25, 2024 by Amanda

Discussion Topic: Applying DORA in Your Context

The DORA Community Discussions start with a brief introduction talk, and then a discussion with the attendees using the Lean coffee .

Topics discussed:

What are your biggest challenges to adapt/apply DORA?

Context matters and trying to simply copy-and-paste DORA is rarely successful so how are your teams and organizations adapting and applying DORA?

From the community:

• Difficult to capture the data properly
• application-specific constraints and practices
• Understanding the "why". Why is it important for me, the engineer? Which is often a different question than "why is it important for my organization?"
• In the absence of information we create a narrative that best supports the information that we have.
• Very often, folks will use whatever you put on a dashboard... so start adding the healthier metrics to the top of your dashboard and move the questionable data to the bottom, or remove completely.

Do we need to get upper management to care about continuous improvement & tracking metrics for that? (and if so, how)

From the community:

• Draw upper management into the discussion with the goal of "innovation". Use innovation as a way to connect to "software delivery"
• Demonstration wins over conversation. Focus on little wins, keep iterating. Communicate the progress to upper management.
• Deming was committed to training the executives before practitioners. Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge
• "organizational scar tissue"....most process was put in place with good intentions but we often fail to revisit whether or not they're still helpful

What strategies have you used to encourage the change to come from your team / the people closest to the work?

From the community:

• Manage the message; try to measure "things" (capabilities, pipelines, streams, etc.) rather than "people" (teams, members, managers)
• Start by first identifying a problem and setting a goal, and then finding a way to measure progress towards the goal. Which means more buy-in on using the metric.

How do you (safely) introduce metrics without it feeling like everyone is under the microscope?

From the community:

• "The First thing to build is TRUST!"
• Use dashboards that only have charts for things that are used for decisions. If quality needs attention... you can subtly add the signal and the questions soon arise that give you the opportunity to say how they could proceed.
• Look at the data with your team, include them in the discussions, ensure they understand how the metrics will be used for good.
• Find metrics that showcase where the team is excelling, along with metrics that they can use to identify areas for improvement.
• Technology adoption life cycle
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity: There's more to it than you think.
• From Dave Farley's Modern Software Engineering book: "...why do we, as software developers, need to ask for permission to do a good job? We are the experts in software development, so we are best placed to understand what works and what doesn't."
• Build in slack time to allow the team to think about continuous improvement opportunities
• Gameify and celebrate the largest lessons learned over the biggest "winners"

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