In this week's episode, we welcome Derek DeBellis, lead researcher on Google's DORA team, for a deep dive into the science and methodology behind DORA's research. We explore Derek's background, his role at Google, and how DORA intersects with other research disciplines. Derek takes us through DORA's research process step by step, from defining outcomes and factors to survey design, analysis, and structural equation modeling.

Discussion points:

• (3:00) Derek’s transition from Microsoft to the DORA team at Google
• (4:28) Derek talks about his connection to surveys
• (6:16) Derek’s journey to becoming a quantitative user experience researcher
• (7:48) Derek simplifies DORA
• (8:19) DORA - Philosophy vs practice
• (11:09) Understanding desired outcomes
• (12:45) Self reported outcomes vs objective outcomes
• (16:16) Derek and Abi discuss the nuances of literature review
• (19:57) Derek details survey development
• (27:55) Pretesting issues
• (29:30) Designing surveys for other companies
• (35:02) Derek simplifies model analysis and validation techniques
• (38:48) Benchmarks: Balancing data limitations with method sensitivity

Mentions and Links:

• Derek DeBellis on LinkedIn
• DX’s guide to measuring GenAI adoption and impact
• 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps Report

This week we’re joined by Sean Mcllroy from Slack’s Release Engineering team to learn about how they’ve fully automated their deployment process. This conversation covers Slack’s original release process, key changes Sean’s team has made, and the latest challenges they’re working on today.

Discussion points:

• (1:34): The Release Engineering team
• (2:13): How the monolith has served Slack
• (3:24): How the deployment process used to work
• (6:23): The complexity of the deploy itself
• (7:39): Early ideas for improving the deployment process
• (9:07): Why anomaly detection is challenging
• (10:32): What a Z-score is
• (13:23): Managing noise with Z-scores
• (16:49): Presenting this information to people that need it
• (19:54): Taking humans out of the process
• (23:13): Handling rollbacks
• (25:27): Not overloading developers with information
• (28:26): Handling large deployments

Mentions and links:

• Read Sean’s blog post, The Scary Thing About Deploys
• Follow Sean on LinkedIn

This week’s episode is the recording of a live conversation between Abi and Chris Westerhold (Thoughtworks Head of Developer Experience). This conversation is useful for anyone early in their journey with developer portals or platforms: Abi and Chris discuss common approaches to solving these problems, pitfalls to avoid, building vs. buying, and more.

Discussion points:

• (3:09) Why there’s an increased interest in developer portals
• (5:33) Chris’ background with dev portals
• (6:37) Homegrown solutions for developer portals
• (9:22) How developer portal initiatives begin
• (11:24) Internal developer portal vs service catalogs and IDPs
• (16:18) Mistakes companies make with developer portals
• (21:05) Approaches to solving this problem
• (24:28) How can developer portals drive value
• (32:07) Common traps to avoid

Mentions and Links

• Follow Chris on LinkedIn
• Watch the recording of this conversation
• Watch part 2 of this conversation on the market landscape
• Learn about PlatformX, DX’s product mentioned in the conversation