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2023 State of DevOps Report Takeaways

Don: The debate is over - how should you structure your software teams? That question is now answered in this year's State of DevOps report 2023. Other questions answered include: How does AI affect my company and team performance? How can we quantify the impact of culture on performance burnout? What even is culture in the first place? All these things are included in the State of DevOps report 2023. We have a very special guest, Eric Maxwell from the DORA group, to offer his takes on the report.

Without automated workflows, your team is missing out on efficiency improvements

Every team has a workflow, even if it’s chaotic or lacks consistency. It’s a no-brainer, though, that in the fast-paced world of software development, a clear and well-defined path to guide your work is essential to move efficiently. Workflows provide just that — the structure and framework that developers need to streamline their processes, collaborate effectively, and optimize productivity.

Let your engineering team delegate toil to the robots with automated actions

If you want to make software engineering easy to improve, then automate actions in your development process. These simple yet high-impact “if this, then that” conditions pack a punch toward reducing toil and cognitive load. Your developers choose what’s important to improve and reap the benefits of an efficient and optimized development environment.

Notifications don't let silent disasters crush your dev team

Smart notifications and nudges are table stakes tools for developers looking to streamline their work and stay focused on building improvements. These automatic alerts are key to a more efficient workflow, freeing us from the burden of repetitive, overwhelming, and time critical tasks — aka, toil.

Without guardrails, engineering teams head for a deadly crash

Every team has guardrails, whether you recognize them or not. They’re a form of automation that can have significant impact on your software development process and the people doing the work. They’re another way to give toil the boot and keep developers in the flow. We’ve made the case for engineering automation in a previous article; here’s how guardrails as automations ensure that agreed upon boundaries and ways of working are codified into team processes.

The case for engineering automation

When you survey developers on how to improve engineering practices and their daily job experience, their answers invariably include getting rid of little annoying things - what's called toil. Toil is manual and repetitive tasks that waste your time. Toil is arguably worse than crisis, because a crisis is temporary and firefighting can feel rewarding when it's over. Toil is more like a death march - an insidious force that eventually leads to burnout.

Improve engineering teams faster with DORA metrics

We talk with numerous teams that want to improve their engineering performance. Here, we explain how to accelerate your progress using DORA metrics — a set of key performance indicators that can help you measure and optimize your team's software development process. You'll learn practical tips on how to leverage these metrics to achieve faster and more efficient team improvement. But first, you'll need your team to see the value in DORA metrics.

Tips to lead software teams and manage up in a challenging market

We’ve all seen the news about tech layoffs. If you’re an engineering manager, are you having to squeeze more out of existing teams, because adding staff anytime soon is unlikely? Maybe you’re tempted to micromanage your developers, thinking that if you know every aspect of their work, it’ll boost productivity. But, that approach doesn’t feel right, and you know your devs would hate you for it. What’s an engineering manager to do?

DORA Metrics Best Trackers Comparison Guide [Feb 2023]

If you're a DevOps team looking for ways to improve your performance, you've probably heard of the Accelerate and DORA metrics. Tracking your performance with these metrics is a challenge, requiring good tooling. You might be tempted to build your own tracking solution, but you don’t need to! Due to the growing popularity of DORA metrics, several tracker tools are available on the market. But how do you choose the best DORA metrics tracker for you? This handy comparison guide will help!