Improving Software Performance: Nathen Harvey, DORA Developer Advocate, on the Importance of Digging Deeper Beyond DORA Metrics

We spoke with Nathen Harvey, who leads DORA at Google Cloud, about why the four keys are a starting point rather than a finish line, and what actually separates teams who build dashboards from teams who get better.

On the role and the research

Nathen Harvey

I’m a developer advocate with Google Cloud and I focus most of my attention on DORA and helping advance the research program. More importantly, I help make the research actionable and help teams put that research into practice.

My team and I focus on making the academically rigorous research actionable and helping teams apply the insights to their own context. We are working to provide a space for the community of practitioners, researchers and leaders in this space, dora.community.

We continually run into folks who are using DORA in some way to help drive their own internal transformation and to drive productivity. We see lots of pitfalls, lots of success, and a lot of everything in the middle. As we’ve built out this community, we’re seeing a lot of real engagement that has us really excited. It’s doing the things that we had hoped it would.

We’re continually finding more and more tooling out there that’s helping teams expose and visualize their DORA metrics alongside a host of other metrics. Looking at DORA’s four key measures of software delivery performance is important, but it is not telling the entire story. Having tools like Waydev, where we can take a bigger picture and look at more data, helps provide a more comprehensive view of how a team is doing.

How do you go beyond those four measures and look at the capabilities, and how do you really help your team improve? As a vendor that’s putting out these DORA metrics, I want to come along with you to help share that message.

On community, and where SPACE fits

Nathen Harvey

We are too, and that was part of our motivation for building out dora.community. We use a community calendar to amplify events in the community that are talking about DORA. We also hold regular community discussions, like the one we had recently with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, who helped start the DORA research program. Although she’s no longer on DORA, her research into developer productivity continues with recent publications like the SPACE framework. She joined a community discussion and we talked about how DORA and SPACE are complementary to one another.

The whole premise of DORA is that we talk about these four keys, but it’s actually about how we help teams adopt a practice of continuous improvement. It starts by knowing where you are, then identifying the bottlenecks, and what’s holding you back.

Cycle time can now give us a direction to look at: let’s investigate there and figure out what capabilities we have strengths in and what capabilities we have weaknesses in. Let’s make one change across teams, and let’s watch those numbers improve.

One of the things that I really like about Waydev is not only are you giving the benchmark, but you’re also showing the direction. Benchmarking is great, but you are also showing improvement: we went 73% down, or we made a 10% improvement, we used to have 90 hours and now we’re slipping. That’s the piece I care about.

Too often I see teams spending months building dashboards to get a more precise view into the four key metrics for software delivery performance. They end up with pretty dashboards but without necessarily making any actual improvements to their capabilities. They’ve invested a lot of engineering capacity and energy into getting better visibility, but little capacity into actually improving. Of course you need that visibility, but if you had to choose visibility or getting better, commit to getting better every time. I want you to be able to spend more of your energy and effort on improving than on validating that you’ve improved.

The takeaway

Harvey’s argument holds up: the four keys are where continuous improvement starts, not where it ends. Visibility into DORA metrics matters, but the teams that actually get better are the ones who spend their energy closing the gap rather than perfecting the dashboard that shows it.

Related: DORA is pausing the survey · DORA metrics in the AI era · Announcing the WAY Framework · DORA metrics · DORA Metrics Playbook · SPACE Framework Playbook

Waydev is the AI-native engineering intelligence platform, giving engineering leaders visibility into DORA metrics, cycle time, sprint progress and project costs, with the ability to build custom dashboards, by connecting to the engineering tool stack: GitHub, CircleCI, Jira and more.