Delivery Metrics, DORA and Operational Excellence

Engineering leaders are asked to show that delivery is healthy and that AI is helping. These posts cover the measures worth using, the ones that mislead, and the habits that make reliability everyone’s job.

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Decoding the 2025 DORA Report is my reading of what the report says about AI-assisted development.
The Agile Metrics That Actually Matter replaces velocity with flow measures.
Why Operational Excellence Must Be Everyone’s Responsibility argues that reliability comes before features.
The New Reality of Incident Response covers new failure modes and how to prepare.

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All writing on this theme

The New Reality of Incident Response
November 2025: AI adds new failure modes to incidents and faster ways to respond. This post covers AI-specific runbooks, recovery basics and a four-phase adoption plan.
Decoding the 2025 DORA Report: What AI-Assisted Development Means for Engineering Excellence
October 2025: The 2025 DORA report finds AI amplifies the organisation you already have. The seven capabilities that matter, and why speed gains outrun stability.
Why Operational Excellence Must Be Everyone's Responsibility: The Foundation of Successful Software Delivery
June 2025: Why reliability must come before features, and how to make operational excellence a shared responsibility across the organisation, not one team's job.
The Agile Metrics That Actually Matter (and How to Use Them)
May 2025: Story points and velocity mislead. Throughput, cycle time, lead time, flow efficiency and quality show how work flows, with eight steps to move your team.
The Problem with PI Planning and the Truth About Agile Metrics
May 2025: PI Planning, story points and velocity promise predictability but breed false certainty and gaming. This post explains why, and how planning for flow helps.
Why Agile Estimation Fails (and What You’re Really Measuring)
May 2025: Why story point estimation gives false precision, eats planning time and rewards effort over value, and why velocity says little about what customers get.