January 11, 2024 by Amanda

Discussion Topic: Focus for 2024

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

Topics discussed:

Internal development platforms, bottom-up or top-down?

From the community:

• Build as a product that solves things people want solved, and not things they enjoy solving ∙
• recognize contributions to the platform
• consider "team topologies" to arrange different kinds of teams
• Team Topologies DORA Community presentation
• Platform as a lab - build cool features into the platform that might be good fits for the product
• "Find something they really hate and build from there" -- I had good support for building an internal dev platform for an embedded project by fixing roadblocks our internal IT team put up. For example, setting up CI infrastructure and giving devs access to a linux dev env.
  • "...and don't take away the problems they like solving…"

Bring cloud costs in front of developers, and gating on a budget in a pipeline.

From the community:

• Cost control is a team activity. Make sure the team has a baseline level of understanding around how costs accumulate when using cloud services.
• It is all related to shifting left FinOps practice and making engineers accountable for their software development costs. It is a wide topic since cloud costs involves various aspects (Infrastructure, logs, etc) - visibility, working against goals is a good step. Empowering developers should start from leadership
• Concerns not only about the cost to the company, but the cost to the planet, using resources to run the cloud.
• Implementing ‘cloud cost management by-design' with platform engineering
• https://www.infracost.io/

Engineering Productivity vs/or DORA

From the community:

• How to empower software delivery teams
• Measure outcomes, the things that will happen if people are able to do their best work together.
• Using visuals like value stream maps gets people more engaged and thinking more laterally.

Where to start in a project/company with the worst DORA metrics?

From the community:

• DORA Core Model
• Start with what's most painful and expand. If it is quality and restoring service, focus on what can move the needle there. If it is developer agility, focus there based on the Dora model. Like any adoption and journey, start small and grow :)

How are you using AI particularly in development and what benefit, if any, are you seeing?

From the community:

• Learning about AI at Agile Testing Days 2023
• Key Benefits of Pairing Generative AI Tools with Developer Observability

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