For almost a decade, Google has surveyed DevOps practices from professionals worldwide and published the result in a yearly report. The report tries to understand the relationship between ways of working and outcomes.
What is particularly interesting is that the report correlates practices with metrics such as software delivery performance. Like: How long does it take from a change is committed to it is running in production? How often do you push changes to production? What is the failure rate of changes and how fast can you rollback from a failed deployment?
The latest report is from October 2023 and is well worth a read if you develop and deploy software professionally. Two insights I found particularly interesting:
- AI is not a silver bullet. There is no conclusive evidence yet that teams that use AI extensively are performing better than companies who have only dipped their toes. You won’t automatically do better by throwing AI and ML after your existing products and processes.
- Good documentation is key. Quality documentation drives implementation and amplifies the impact of other changes. It also has a positive impact on team performance, productivity, and job satisfaction.
I’m particularly happy to see documentation promoted as it is a practice I have always been advocating and often a driver for. The hardest part of writing good documentation is getting started. So start now with whatever you are working on right now. The report provides a link to Write the Docs, a global community of people who care about documentation. There you will find a very good guide, also on how to build a documentation mindset in your workplace.
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