The Google Cloud DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team produces an annual report that measures the effectiveness of software development and delivery teams.
In this article, we'll take a look at the performance metrics used to produce the DORA scores, and show how on-demand data from Tonic Ephemeral, as well as the integration between Ephemeral and Tonic Structural, can improve the DORA score for your development teams.
Bringing features and fixes to customers faster
The first few metrics are time-based and reflect how quickly teams deploy, update, and repair their software.
For deployment frequency, teams score higher when they are able to deploy features and fixes more frequently.
Next is the lead time for changes. Teams score higher when they reduce the time between completing the code and running it in production.
And then there is the time to restore service. Teams score higher when they reduce the time to bring software back up after an unexpected outage or defect.
These time-based metrics require quick testing and development cycles. And quick testing and development cycles require access to realistic data that developers can efficiently create, reset, and reuse.
With Ephemeral, developers can quickly spin up a new and realistic database for each round—no waiting for a database administrator spending time on manually mocked-up data that doesn't necessarily represent typical customer data.
Database administrators can prepopulate Ephemeral with right-sized snapshots that developers can use to create brand new databases. One way to do that is to use the integration with Structural to create a smaller snapshot of production data that is scrubbed of all sensitive values.
Reducing bad code
DORA also tracks the change failure rate. Teams score higher when they reduce the number of features and fixes that introduce defects into the code.
Bad code decreases with increased testing. And developers can do more, better, and earlier (shift-left) testing when they have available, reusable, and realistic data for testing.
When they use Ephemeral, developers can easily do multiple rounds of testing, because it takes so little time to start another round with the same set of data in an isolated environment. They can also be more thorough, testing a variety of scenarios with different sets of data.
Improving reliability and security
In addition to those metrics, the DORA team also looks at reliability and security. Ephemeral databases can also help with these aspects of DevOps.
Using Ephemeral to conduct tests with realistic data helps to sniff out issues before they can bring down your software.
And when you combine Ephemeral with Structural's data masking and subsetting features, using realistic data does not mean sacrificing security. You can easily create Ephemeral snapshots from masked production. The data is then ready and waiting for developers to create databases to use during development and testing.
Recap
The DORA scoring for DevOps reflects how quickly and securely development teams can produce and deploy reliable, high-quality code.
Tonic Ephemeral can be a vital tool to improve coding efficiency and quality. Developers can quickly create new, isolated databases for each round of testing. This also means that they can complete more testing rounds in a shorter amount of time, reducing the chance of defects worming their way into a release.
With the Structural integration, those databases can come from right-sized subsets of production data that mask all sensitive data. Realistic data also improves the quality and effectiveness of testing cycles.
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