The new DORA report got released and has 30 pages dedicated to AI adoption. One particular finding stuck out to me: an increase in AI adoption was cor

DORA: AI boosting productivity, hindering delivery | Zarar's blog

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-30 14:00:03

The new DORA report got released and has 30 pages dedicated to AI adoption. One particular finding stuck out to me: an increase in AI adoption was correlated with an increase in code quality, quicker code reviews, decrease in code complexity, decrease in technical debt and improved documentation. However, it was also correlated with a decrease in the key DORA metrics of lead time, throughput and change failure rate, while having no positive impact on product performance.

This is counter intuitive because you would imagine improving your software development process would lead to better software delivery performance. After all, if you're writing better code, having that code reviewed faster, you'd think that it would have some notable downstream impacts. Turns out it's not and the authors hypothesize that:

...the fundamental paradigm shift that AI has produced in terms of respondent productivity and code generation speed may have caused the field to forget one of DORA’s most basic principles—the importance of small batch sizes. That is, since AI allows respondents to produce a much greater amount of code in the same amount of time, it is possible, even likely, that changelists are growing in size. DORA has consistently shown that larger changes are slower and more prone to creating instability.

Leave a Comment