Dr. Nicole Forsgren on DevOps: 'You Are What You Measure'

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is the CEO and Chief Scientist of DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), and the principal author of the annual State of DevOps Report.  On many occasions, she’s asserted the case that “you are what you measure” — that a company’s capabilities may be either enabled or constrained by the extent to which it is capable of perceiving how it does what it does.  In a recent conversation for The New Stack, I presented Dr. Forsgren with the notion that an organization that automates its processes in a cloud native manner must also measure those processes cloud-natively as well.  In so doing, I suggested, it would create a business that operated under very different principles, since it operates on a platform where measurement has a very different context. “I think I’ll agree to the point that, when we change our technology stack and applications in order to be cloud native,” the CEO responded, “that will likely change the way we do our work, whether it’s through a direct change because we’ve changed our work, or through the measurements that we now employ to track and evaluate that work.