As companies strive to squeeze out every last bit of productivity, they often look to outside help for management or organizational consulting. That’s where the DevOps Research and Assessment LLC, or DORA, group comes in, publishing an annual report on the effectiveness of software development organizations. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Nicole Forsgren (pictured) explained the difference between this report and other industry reports that allows for predictive analysis, rather than merely reporting metrics and anecdotes.

“The ‘State of DevOps’ report is so different because it’s academically rigorous; it’s a true research report. … There’s this really fantastic opportunity to take a look at what’s going on, but we have to measure this in really rigorous ways. By doing that it allows us to look at predictive relationships,” Forsgren said during the recent PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco.

Forsgren and Jeff Frick (@jefffrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, discussed the research methods underlying her company’s annual report and the consulting aspects of DORA. (* Disclosure below.)

Research in action

DORA has been able to leverage academic research to offer consulting services for companies looking to improve operational efficiency. The service begins with an assessment of throughput from individual contributors that is extrapolated to the organization as a whole.

Using scientifically based measures based on “over four years of rigorous academic research,” DORA can initiate an assessment with a short survey to collect data from “everyone in your organization,” Forsgren explained.

“Who are doers, [developers], tests, [operations, quality assurance], vendors, contractors, consultants — the people that are in the weeds every single day? I can measure you; I can benchmark you against the industry. I’ve got 23,000 data points around the world for all industries, all company sizes,” Forsgren said.

Based on the results of the survey, DORA is able to make insightful observations on where an organization is suffering from a performance bottleneck. When a company takes actions on these observations, not only is the research verified, but the company can see a tremendous impact on bottomline productivity.

“I can algorithmically tell you what your bottleneck is, what your constraint is, where you should start to accelerate your performance based on your data. A really great example is [Capital One N.A.]. They did the assessment across over a dozen lines of business, and by focusing on two core capabilities out of over 20, they saw a 20x improvement in deploy frequency in over two months with zero increase in incident frequency,” Forsgren said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the PagerDuty Summit. (* Disclosure: PagerDuty Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither PagerDuty nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE