The DORA research said culture predicts engineering performance. Nicole Forsgren's most important finding never made it into a single commercial product.
As a computer scientist, I love data. Things feel good, things feel bad, but our biases shape those feelings, and data is what pulls the signal out. I've believed that since my first software engineering job.
At that first job, I was fortunate to work with people who fully believed in measuring things. This was before the age of observability, but the organization was advanced in terms of how it measured the product. Not from a data analytics standpoint. I mean that as engineering teams, as we built features, we made hypotheses about behavior and made sure we measured it. We had anomaly detection in place well before the analytics team did.
For all that, the only things we tracked about the engineering team itself were deployment frequency (we were an early continuous deployment shop) and whether we hit our delivery dates. That was the extent of it.
In 2017, I attended DevOps Days. That was the year they did the Monsters of DevOps tour: Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Kelsey Hightower, Nicole Forsgren, among others. Hightower threw out his prepared talk and just told his story. An unexpected diversion into human struggle and vulnerability in a conference about automation. My favorite talk was still Forsgren's. She presented the data on correlations between deployment frequency and high-performing organizations, and then spent the last fifteen or twenty minutes on something I hadn't heard anyone talk about seriously before: how to measure culture using Westrum typology and the research behind it.
