- [Brad] It's lunch time, and this is Brad Anderson's Lunch Break. Two of my favorite things about Microsoft are the smart people that constantly visit campus and the great fleet of shuttles. Whenever I can I try to take advantage of both of these things, and grab lunch with some of the tech industry's best and brightest. Today I'm driving around with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, a researcher, DevOps expert, and CEO and Chief Scientist at DORA. (jaunty music) - Hey - [Brad] How's it goin', Nicole? - I'm good. Sweet minivan. - You know, I wanted to harken back to the early days when we needed to have a minivan in order to put our kids in it. It's like a walk down memory lane here for me. In software, we're all about data and we all use data to make decisions, and you've brought this uncanny academic rigor to how you use data. In fact, you have so much passion you formed your own company. So tell us a little bit about the company, your background and this passion on data. - Sure. So DORA is DevOps Research and Assessment. We've been doing research looking at how organizations can use so many fantastic capabilities to drive improvement in their ability to make software with both speed and stability. That's really the key central component in helping organizations perform amazingly well. And I say perform, so that's profitability, productivity, market share. - Yeah so it's both internal and external because a big part of performing is employee satisfaction, employee passion. - Also, decreasing employee pain, decreasing burnout. - Because we talk about this in-depth DevOps approach to IT and to Dev. How does that impact morale? - When we study DevOps or technology transformation we take kind of a holistic approach and it includes culture, it includes technology, it includes Agile in measurements, and the piece in Agile includes how you develop software and team experimentation. And so the way it affects morale and team culture is we see greater communication, greater information flow, risks are shared, novelty is encouraged and implemented, morale is improved, and that ends up feeding through and having a positive impact on the entire organization's performance. For so long, have you heard before, 'IT's a cost center, IT's a cost center,' - That's definitely transitioned but that's the way it's been talked about for years. I'm tired of it. - Right? Seriously. But what we find is that it's really an investment. If you see it and if you view it as an investment it pays back dividends tenfold, because it makes your technology better. It makes your employees better. It makes your employees happier. It delivers value to your business. Again, profitability, productivity, market share. - [Brad] What's the most common pitfall organizations fall into in this area? - So there, I think there are a couple. So one is not measuring the things that matter. Right, so we have, sometimes it's just local optimizations. Right, sometimes people are like 'I'm gonna do CI, Continuous Integration, or I'm gonna do Continuous Delivery, because Continuous Delivery,' and then they just get spun up on something. Right? Or they'll measure something because it's convenient, or easy, and then it shows up on a report and that's all they pay attention to. And I'm sure you've seen that. - Oh, a hundred times, and then there are even things that I've asked to be measured and then realized it was the wrong things. - Which is fine, because it's continuous improvement, continuous learning, so then you could still keep it if you want, but at least pull it off the report. - Yeah, but start measuring, and then you're gonna realize that you're gonna get better. Just the numbers, when you first start doing the measurement the numbers are gonna be dirty, they're not gonna be clean. - Realize the power of an honest baseline. If it's bad, that's even better because you have nowhere to go but up. - At least you got a place to start from. That has been this journey, I think, that many of us have gone through. That it is all about getting started and then constantly learning, constantly getting better, constantly refining, but you gotta start. - And it gives you something to talk about and communicate about. Suddenly, if you're on a different team, I can talk to you about it. And, if I think your performance or your metrics or something sucks, that's okay because I have something to talk about instead of yelling at you, we can yell about the thing. - That makes it tangible and real. You can have a conversation and then say 'Okay, now how are we gonna go get better on this?' - Exactly - Next time on Brad Anderson's Lunch Break: - If you wanna be super capitalistic about it, we find so much research everywhere showing that diversity of background, diversity of thought, diversity of gender, diversity of race, diversity of all the things leads to better outcomes. You make better products, you build better software, you get better outcomes. It's worth the investment. (jaunty music)
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