DORA's State of DevOps research program represents seven years of research and data from over 32,000 professionals worldwide. It is the longest running academically rigorous research investigation of its kind, providing an independent view into the practices and capabilities that drive high performance in technology delivery and ultimately organizational outcomes. Our research uses behavioral science to identify the most effective and efficient ways to develop and deliver software.
Use our quick check tool to discover how you compare to industry peers, identify specific capabilities you can use to improve performance, and make progress toward becoming an elite performer.
You can also explore our research program using the interactive diagram below, or browse the catalog at the bottom of this page. To find out more about a particular capability or outcome, click or tap on the text description. Drag or hover over capabilities to see how they impact other capabilities and outcomes.
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(in partnership with Puppet)
(in partnership with Puppet)
(in partnership with Puppet)
(in partnership with Puppet)
Explore the technical, process, measurement, and cultural capabilities which drive higher software delivery and organizational performance. Each of the articles below presents a capability, discusses how to implement it, and how to overcome common obstacles. You can also learn how to deploy a program to implement these capabilities in our article "How to Transform."
A guide to implementing the right version control practices for reproducibility and traceability.
Learn about common mistakes, ways to measure, and how to improve on your continuous integration efforts.
Best practices and approaches for deployment automation and reducing manual intervention in the release process.
Prevent merge-conflict hassles with trunk-based development practices.
Improve software quality by building reliable automated test suites and performing all kinds of testing throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
Make deploying software a reliable, low-risk process that can be performed on demand at any time.
Learn about moving from a tightly coupled architecture to service-oriented and microservice architectures without re-architecting everything at once.
Find out how to manage cloud infrastructure effectively so you can achieve higher levels of agility, availability, and cost visibility.
Understand the right strategies for managing test data effectively along with approaches to provide fast, secure data access for testing.
Empower teams to make informed decisions on tools and technologies. Learn how these decisions drive more effective software delivery.
Build security into the software development lifecycle without compromising delivery speed.
Make sure database changes don't cause problems or slow you down.
Make it easy for developers to find, reuse, and change code, and keep dependencies up-to-date.
Innovate faster by building empowered teams that can try out new ideas without approval from people outside the team.
Replace heavyweight change-approval processes with peer review, to get the benefits of a more reliable, compliant release process without sacrificing speed.
Drive better organizational outcomes by gathering customer feedback and incorporating it into product and feature design.
Understand and visualize the flow of work from idea to customer outcome in order to drive higher performance.
Create shorter lead times and faster feedback loops by working in small batches. Learn common obstacles to this critical capability and how to overcome them.
Learn how to build tooling to help you understand and debug your production systems.
Improve monitoring across infrastructure platforms, middleware, and the application tier, so you can provide fast feedback to developers.
Set proactive failure notifications to identify critical issues and act on problems before they arise.
Prioritize work, limit the amount of things that people are working on, and focus on getting a small number of high-priority tasks done.
Learn about the principles of visual management to promote information sharing, get a common understanding of where the team is, and how to improve.
Find out about the importance of ensuring your people have the tools and resources to do their job, and of making good use of their skills and abilities.
Discover how growing a generative, high-trust culture drives better organizational and software delivery performance.
Learn how effective leaders influence software delivery performance by driving the adoption of technical and product management capabilities.
Grow a learning culture and understand its impact on your organizational performance.