"We want to help you get better at getting better. This is all about a journey of continuous learning and continuous improvement."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"AI is an amplifier. If you're working in an organization that has those foundational principles and practices in place, AI is going to amplify that and help you accelerate even more. On the other hand, if you're working in an environment that's very disconnected, there's a lot of friction and chaos within your organization, introducing AI is probably going to make the pains of that chaos more acute."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"Some of the things we've learned over time are durable. They're foundational principles for a reason, and those are things we should be investing in at least as much, if not more, now that we have AI. The biggest visible impact from AI is you can generate a whole lot more code in much less time. So how are you going to manage all of that change? You go back to those foundational principles that we've been talking about and improving over the past decades with software engineering."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"Every time I run a value stream mapping exercise with a team, 100% of the time there are crazy a-ha moments. There's friction that's identified, duplicative work that's identified. There are steps happening in that process that simply don't need to happen. We don't even need to think about automating them—we can just get rid of those steps. They're not adding any value. They're not helping us in any way. Having a to-stop list is way better than a to-do list."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"Agree on what I call the consequences of overspending your error budget in advance—in a time where it's not 'oh my gosh, everything has gone terrible, we've got to fix this right now.' We have to agree on what we're going to do when we violate those SLOs and how we're going to respond. Come up with a pact, an agreement. And then when we do overextend our SLOs or miss those SLOs—and let's be clear, we will miss our SLOs, that's just part of how work happens—we agree that we're going to hold steadfast to that pact, to that agreement of how we're going to change in order to recover that SLO that we lost."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"It helps you level set the right level of reliability. An SLO doesn't say a hundred percent available, a hundred percent fast all the time. We use SLOs to figure out what's the acceptable level of reliability that keeps a customer—a typical customer—happy enough that they keep coming back and keep using the service. That's very different than striving for five nines across every measure that you have."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"About 30% of our survey respondents said they have little or no trust in AI. I think 30% is probably a healthy number. You shouldn't expect to take whatever the AI gives you and ship it, whether that's code or an email you want to send to your boss or to a customer. We should verify. We should have good feedback mechanisms in place to validate that this is what we actually want to ship. So I think that's healthy."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"It's intentionality. We've got to be intentional about it, and that intentionality can be across a wide spectrum. Some of that intentionality could be, 'We just want to go and learn. We want to create an environment where it's safe to experiment, safe to learn, and as you learn things, it's easy to share those lessons across the organization.' That's one really great way to approach it. I would lean less towards trying to control and more towards allowing for experimentation, because I think that's what's going to give you the best results."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"Tools and culture are inextricably linked. They reinforce and amplify one another, and so this is an opportunity for all of us to say, 'Hey, there are practices or ways of working that we've always wanted and we've struggled with. Let's use AI as the excuse for why we have to go start doing those things.' Use AI as the reason why we have to collaborate more. Use AI as the reason why we do more pair programming or more test-first programming. Use AI as the reason why we do better documentation. All of these things are going to pay off and help change the culture of your organization, hopefully for the better."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"A lot of senior engineers are starting to go down the agentic path and are writing Claude MD files or Gemini MD files that explicitly state 'this is my way of working.' I find it ironic that these senior engineers would never write it down for a junior engineer so they could learn, but they will write it down for a bot so the bot gives them better outputs. The side effect is they've written it down and now junior engineers can take advantage of that knowledge. We've made that knowledge much more explicit for everyone in the organization, including the AI robots that are writing code for us."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"Create communities of practice, not centers of excellence. You want to create a place where information and ideas can flow organically throughout your organization. A center of excellence oftentimes becomes a group that sits up on a high tower and is disconnected from the work. So don't do that. Create the communities of practice that allow that knowledge to spread throughout the organization."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"Please stop measuring lines of code accepted or lines of code generated by AI—or at least understand that all that's measuring is usage of the tool. It measures nothing beyond that. As you introduced a new IDE to your team, did you ask which of your IDEs allows developers to write more code? Is it Visual Studio Code? Is it IntelliJ? Or is it Vim? Which one of these developers is the most productive? We never ask that question. Stop asking it about AI."

Nathen Harvey

DORA Lead & Developer Advocate at Google

"You should be focused on being a better version of your own team, your own organization. There's a hierarchy of benchmarking—as a team, thinking about yourself and your previous state and seeing if your team is better. If you're a VP or CTO, then maybe those industry benchmarks are useful as a 'Hey, what should I be thinking about?' Not so much 'Oh, my org sucks and that team's great.' It's more 'Where could we be? Where can we try and improve?'"

Ganesh Datta

CTO & Co-founder of Cortex

"One of the conversations I had recently was, 'Oh, we're expecting our product owners to do a better job of writing out the specifications and the expected behaviors upfront, because that allows coding assistants to do a better job of implementing them.' I'm thinking, 'Okay, well actually you've changed your culture because you're forcing, again, more intentionality about what is the change and what is the behavior and what should it do and how should it impact our customers.' Naturally you'll lead to better outcomes."

Ganesh Datta

CTO & Co-founder of Cortex