A year ago in York
Does your phone have that feature where it highlights your photo memories? Here's one of mine!
In June 2024 at Ministry of Testing York, Sophie Weston presented her talk - Going Beyond DORA.
I say talk, but Sophie herself says she took inspiration from the 2018 FFS Tech Conference. (Something which sounds right up my street!) Meaning; the short productive rant was followed by a fantastic audience discussion.
For anybody unfamiliar, DORA measures 4 key areas; change lead time, deployment frequency, change fail percentage and failed deployment recovery time.
Sophie points out that these metrics are not people-centric and do nothing to consider the bigger picture. The book Accelerate, puts these metrics into a bigger picture which includes job satisfaction, burnout, identity and transformational leadership, alongside other technical health considerations like test automation and monitoring.
It may well be the case that DORA identifies a long change lead time, but on its own, will not inform which aspect of the SDLC should be focused on.
Instead, Sophie suggests moving from quantitive DORA metrics to the qualitative SPACE or DevEx frameworks. This is because the frameworks look at the overall percieved ease of delivering software, which enables success to be more easily shared between development teams.
Google's DORA research folks want input from testing professionals for the 2025 survey which you can complete here: https://dora.dev/survey/
