DevOps capabilities

The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified and validated a set of capabilities that drive higher software delivery and organizational performance. These articles describe how to implement, improve, and measure these capabilities.

Technical capabilities

• Cloud infrastructure

  Find out how to manage cloud infrastructure effectively so you can achieve higher levels of agility, availability, and cost visibility.

• Code maintainability

  Make it easy for developers to find, reuse, and change code, and keep dependencies up-to-date.

• Continuous delivery

  Make deploying software a reliable, low-risk process that can be performed on demand at any time.

• Continuous integration

  Learn about common mistakes, ways to measure, and how to improve on your continuous integration efforts.

• Test automation

  Improve software quality by building reliable automated test suites and performing all kinds of testing throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

• Database change management

  Make sure database changes don't cause problems or slow you down.

• Deployment automation

  Best practices and approaches for deployment automation and reducing manual intervention in the release process.

• Empowering teams to choose tools

  Empower teams to make informed decisions on tools and technologies. Learn how these decisions drive more effective software delivery.

• Loosely coupled architecture

  Learn about moving from a tightly coupled architecture to service-oriented and microservice architectures without re-architecting everything at once.

• Monitoring and observability

  Learn how to build tooling to help you understand and debug your production systems.

• Shifting left on security

  Build security into the software development lifecycle without compromising delivery speed.

• Test data management

  Understand the right strategies for managing test data effectively along with approaches to provide fast, secure data access for testing.

• Trunk-based development

  Prevent merge-conflict hassles with trunk-based development practices.

• Version control

  A guide to implementing the right version control practices for reproducibility and traceability.

Process capabilities

• Customer feedback

  Drive better organizational outcomes by gathering customer feedback and incorporating it into product and feature design.

• Monitoring systems to inform business decisions

  Improve monitoring across infrastructure platforms, middleware, and the application tier, so you can provide fast feedback to developers.

• Proactive failure notification

  Set proactive failure notifications to identify critical issues and act on problems before they arise.

• Streamlining change approval

  Replace heavyweight change-approval processes with peer review, to get the benefits of a more reliable, compliant release process without sacrificing speed.

• Team experimentation

  Innovate faster by building empowered teams that can try out new ideas without approval from people outside the team.

• Visibility of work in the value stream

  Understand and visualize the flow of work from idea to customer outcome in order to drive higher performance.

• Visual management

  Learn about the principles of visual management to promote information sharing, get a common understanding of where the team is, and how to improve.

• Work in process limits

  Prioritize work, limit the amount of things that people are working on, and focus on getting a small number of high-priority tasks done.

• Working in small batches

  Create shorter lead times and faster feedback loops by working in small batches. Learn common obstacles to this critical capability and how to overcome them.

Cultural capabilities

• Generative organizational culture

  Discover how growing a generative, high-trust culture drives better organizational and software delivery performance.

• Job satisfaction

  Find out about the importance of ensuring your people have the tools and resources to do their job, and of making good use of their skills and abilities.

• Learning culture

  Grow a learning culture and understand its impact on your organizational performance.

• Transformational leadership

  Learn how effective leaders influence software delivery performance by driving the adoption of technical and product management capabilities.