DORA Report 2024 – A Look at Throughput and Stability

Google recently released the 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps (DORA) report, and there were some holy shit moments in those 120 pages. Or–to phrase it more professionally–this year’s report has some very interesting and counterintuitive findings.

In particular this year the report rethinks some fundamental aspects of throughput and stability–MTTR is now being reconsidered as a measurement of throughput and rework rate is being added as a factor of stability. The report also makes it clear that while AI-enabled software delivery is here, its impacts on the system at large are mixed.

In regards to AI in particular, as some of these metrics contradict the industry narrative about the technology, I revisit the theory of constraints and hypothesize that writing code isn’t the bottleneck to deploying reliable applications.

The DORA report is created by surveying tens of thousands of technology professionals and aggregating the ensuing data, with the goal of determining if there are practices that are predictive of engineering excellence. The report is in its 10th year, originally conducted as part of Puppet Labs and then operating independently before being bought by Google in 2018.

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