TL;DR: Key Takeaways from the 2024 Google Cloud DORA Report

AI’s Impact on Software Delivery and Productivity

AI adoption in DevOps is no longer a trend; it’s now a core component of many teams’ workflows. The 2024 DORA Report sheds light on how AI is influencing software delivery and developer productivity, with both positive and negative effects.

Positive Outcomes: Teams that adopted AI reported significant gains in productivity, with an estimated 2.1% increase in productivity and 2.6% increase in job satisfaction for every 25% rise in AI adoption. AI is particularly effective in improving coding speed, optimizing code quality, and enhancing internal documentation.

AI-Driven Workflow Enhancements: The report highlights that 75.9% of developers are using AI for daily tasks such as writing code, summarizing information, debugging, and testing. AI also enhances the speed of code reviews and reduces technical debt, with a 7.5% improvement in documentation quality when AI is fully integrated into development workflows.

Challenges with AI: However, the report also points out an unexpected downside to AI adoption. While AI boosts individual productivity, it has been linked to a 1.5% reduction in delivery throughput and a 7.2% decrease in delivery stability. This suggests that teams may be creating larger changelists as AI enables faster coding, which in turn increases the complexity of deployments and the risk of failure.

Takeaway: AI offers incredible potential for improving developer workflows, but teams need to be aware of its potential negative impacts on stability and throughput. An internal developer portal provides the visibility engineering leaders need to monitor these performance metrics, ensuring that AI adoption doesn’t inadvertently slow down your overall software delivery performance.

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The Rise of Platform Engineering

Platform engineering has become a critical discipline for high-performing teams, and the 2024 DORA Report highlights both its benefits and its complexities. The creation of internal developer platforms is helping teams streamline workflows and scale self-service capabilities.

Productivity Gains: Teams that leverage internal developer platforms saw a 10% increase in team performance and an 8% boost in individual productivity. By abstracting away complex operational tasks and enabling self-service, platform engineering helps developers focus on coding and innovation without being bogged down by infrastructure management.

Unexpected Drawbacks: Despite the positive outcomes, platform engineering introduced some performance challenges. The report found an 8% decrease in throughput and a 14% decrease in change stability when teams were required to exclusively use internal platforms for all lifecycle tasks. This suggests that while platforms can enhance productivity, they may also add complexity to the delivery pipeline, which can slow deployments and increase failure rates.

Takeaway: Platform engineering can boost productivity but needs to be carefully implemented to avoid undermining delivery speed and stability. OpsLevel helps platform teams create highly usable software catalogs by leveraging automation to keep data rich and accurate, and self-service workflows (like spinning up new services and executing on common operational tasks) that increase productivity while mitigating throughput and stability challenges.

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Organizational Stability and Developer Burnout

The 2024 DORA Report also underscores the importance of organizational priorities in maintaining developer productivity and well-being. It found that teams with stable priorities performed significantly better than those with shifting priorities, particularly when it came to reducing burnout.

Burnout and Priorities: Teams that reported unstable organizational priorities experienced substantial increases in burnout, with an estimated 40% higher risk of burnout compared to teams with stable priorities. This instability also led to meaningful decreases in productivity, even when these organizations had strong leaders and good internal documentation.

Takeaway: Prioritizing stability in both technical and operational decisions can lead to higher team productivity and lower burnout. OpsLevel’s service maturity assessments help engineering leaders align their team’s efforts with organizational priorities, providing clarity and stability that help reduce burnout.

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The Four Key Metrics of Software Delivery Performance

A consistent theme across all DORA reports is the importance of tracking and optimizing four key metrics: change lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and recovery time from failed deployments. This year’s report provides fresh insights into how these metrics continue to separate elite performers from the rest.

Elite Performance: According to the 2024 report, elite teams—those in the top 20% of performance—deploy multiple times per day, recover from failed deployments in less than an hour, and maintain a 5% change failure rate or lower. In contrast, low performers take between one month and six months to deploy changes and recover from failed deployments in up to one month.

Takeaway: Tracking these four key metrics is crucial for achieving elite performance. With customizable dashboards where you can bring data in from multiple sources, OpsLevel allows you to see the big picture and get actionable insights that can help you improve team-wide performance.

Continuous Improvement and Adaptation

The 2024 DORA Report is a reminder that DevOps success is not a one-time achievement—it’s a continuous process of improvement and adaptation. AI and platform engineering offer exciting new opportunities, but they also bring new challenges, particularly in terms of stability and throughput. By staying focused on the four key metrics of software delivery and maintaining stable organizational priorities, teams can navigate these complexities and continue to drive high performance.

OpsLevel is here to help you achieve these goals with the tools and insights your team needs to thrive. With our automated software catalog, maturity assessments, and self-service developer workflows, your team can stay agile, productive, and focused on continuous improvement.

Key Stats Recap

• 2.1% increase in productivity for every 25% rise in AI adoption.
• 10% boost in team performance from platform engineering.
• 7.2% decrease in delivery stability linked to AI adoption.
• 8% decrease in throughput from platform engineering.
• Teams with stable priorities face 40% less burnout compared to those with shifting priorities.
• Elite performers deploy multiple times per day and recover from failures in under one hour.

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