Original source: appdevelopermagazine.com (April 2018)
DORA and Google Cloud Announce Joint DevOps Research Initiative
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) announced in April 2018 that it would partner with Google Cloud on a major new research initiative: the Accelerate State of DevOps Report. The collaboration was designed to produce original, in-depth research into the practices and capabilities that most significantly affect software delivery performance and organizational outcomes.
The partnership brought together DORA’s established research methodology with Google Cloud’s reach and customer base, with the shared goal of giving engineering and IT leaders actionable, evidence-based guidance for improving their teams.
What the Research Aimed to Achieve
According to the announcement, the joint research programme had three core objectives:
- Understand developer priorities: Identify the issues that matter most to software engineers and their teams in real-world delivery environments.
- Improve resource management and productivity: Surface findings that help organisations allocate effort more effectively across their IT functions.
- Raise software quality: Provide a clear path forward for teams looking to reduce defects, lower change failure rates, and speed up recovery from incidents.
Google Cloud’s Perspective on the Collaboration
Sam Ramji, then VP of Product Management at Google Cloud, framed the partnership around the broader challenge of organisational transformation that cloud adoption demands:
“Our customers migrate to the cloud to change how they approach IT — how they write software, how they operate their businesses and how they differentiate. They’re in the business of transformation. DORA’s rigor and experience in conducting this type of research will help give all cloud users a roadmap for transforming their organizations.”
— Sam Ramji, VP of Product Management, Google Cloud (2018)
The quote signals that Google saw the research not merely as an academic exercise, but as a practical resource for its cloud customers navigating large-scale IT change.
The DORA Research Team
The research effort was led by the founding DORA team:
- Dr. Nicole Forsgren — lead researcher and data scientist whose statistical modelling underpins DORA’s findings on software delivery and organisational performance.
- Jez Humble — co-author of Continuous Delivery and a long-standing advocate for lean and agile engineering practices.
- Gene Kim — author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook, with deep expertise in IT management and transformation.
The team’s stated mission was to help organisations identify their unique strengths and target the specific capabilities most likely to improve performance — rather than applying a one-size-fits-all framework.
Context: Why This Partnership Mattered
By 2018, DORA had already established a reputation for rigorous, survey-based research on DevOps adoption through its annual State of DevOps Reports (previously produced in partnership with Puppet and other sponsors). The move to collaborate with Google Cloud marked a significant shift, aligning the research programme with one of the world’s largest cloud providers and giving it access to a broader audience of cloud-native engineering teams.
The resulting Accelerate State of DevOps Report series — and the companion book Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble, and Kim — went on to become widely cited references in the DevOps and platform engineering communities, particularly for its introduction of the four key metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service) now commonly referred to as the DORA metrics.
Key Takeaways
- DORA and Google Cloud announced joint research in April 2018, producing the Accelerate State of DevOps Report.
- The research focuses on software delivery performance, productivity, quality, and organisational transformation.
- The partnership brought academic rigour (DORA) together with large-scale cloud industry reach (Google Cloud).
- The DORA metrics that emerged from this work are now a standard framework for measuring engineering team performance.
- Google later acquired DORA in 2018, further deepening the relationship.