Episode description

On the show this week, we’re talking updated DevOps practices for 2022 with hosts Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon and our guests Nathen Harvey and Derek DeBellis.

Nathen and Derek start the show with a thorough discussion of DORA, the research program dedicated to helping organizations improve software delivery and operations, and the state of DevOps report that Google publishes every year. This year, the DevOps research team strengthened their focus on security and discovered that one of the biggest predictors in security practice adoption is company culture. Open, communicative, and trustful company cultures are some of the best for accepting and implementing optimized security practices. Derek tells us how company cultures are measured and scored for this purpose and Nathen talks about team and individual burnout and its affects on culture.

Low, medium, high, and elite teams are another indicator of culture, and Nathen explains how teams earn their label through four keys of software delivery performance. Each year, they let the data show these four clusters of team performance. But this year there were only three, and Derek talks more about this phenomenon and why the elite cluster seems to have disappeared. When operational performance analysis was added, the four clusters reemerged and were renamed to better suit the new analysis metrics. Nathen details these four new clusters: starting, which performs neither well nor poorly and may be just starting out; flowing, teams that are performing well across throughput, stability, and operational performance; slowing teams, which don’t have high throughput but excel in other areas; and retiring teams, which are reliable but not actively developing projects. We discuss how companies may shift from one cluster to another and how much context can affect this shift.

We talk about key findings in the 2022 DevOps report, especially in the security space. Some of the most notable include the adoption of DevOps security practices and the decreased incidence of burnout on teams who leverage security practices. Nathen and Derek elaborate on how this year’s research changed from last year and what remained the same.

Nathen works with teams helping them learn about and apply the findings of our research into high performing teams. He’s been involved in the DevOps community for more than a decade.

Derek is a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Google, where Derek focuses on survey research, logs analysis, and figuring out ways to measure concepts central to product development. Derek has published on Human-AI interaction, the impact of Covid-19’s onset on smoking cessation, designing for NLP errors and the role of UX in ensuring privacy.

• Try out Cloud Spanner databases at no cost with new free trial instances blog
• Chipotle Is Testing More Artificial Intelligence Solutions To Improve Operations article
• Gyfted uses Google Cloud AI/ML tools to match tech workers with the best jobs blog

• 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report blog
• DevOps site
• 2022 State of the DevOps Report Report site
• DORA site
• DORA Community site
• SLSA site
• Security Software Development Framework site
• Westrum organizational culture site
• Google finds culture, not tech, is the biggest predictor of DevOps security outcomes article
• GCP Podcast Episode 205: DevOps with Nathen Harvey and Jez Humble podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 284: State of DevOps Report 2021 with Nathen Harvey and Dustin Smith podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 290: Resiliency at Shopify with Camilo Lopez and Tai Dickerson podcast

Steph is working on talks for DevFest Nantes and a Google Cloud dev conference in London. She’ll be talking about subsea fiber optics and Google Cloud networking products.

Chloe is a Noogler, so she’s been working on learning as much as she can! She is excited to make her podcast debut this week!

Stephanie Wong and Chloe Condon