DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) is a significant and rigorous research program in the field of software development, particularly focusing on DevOps practices. Their findings offer valuable insights into the best practices and metrics that drive successful DevOps implementations. Key aspects from DORA’s research include:

1. Version Control: Emphasizes the use of systems like Git for managing all production artifacts, which is fundamental in DevOps for tracking changes and collaboration​​.

2. Continuous Delivery: Teams should be able to deploy to production on demand. Continuous delivery is achieved through practices like continuous integration, trunk-based development, comprehensive version control, and continuous testing. It leads to improved software delivery performance, better organizational culture, reduced rework, and lower burnout​​.

3. Continuous Integration: Involves regular code check-ins, with each check-in triggering tests to quickly identify regressions. This is essential for creating reliable builds and packages for deployment​​.

4. Database Change Management: Effective management of database changes is vital, including storing changes as scripts in version control and making these changes visible to everyone in the software delivery lifecycle​​.

5. Deployment Automation: Successful DevOps practices involve fully automated deployments without the need for manual intervention​​.

6. Empowering Teams to Choose Tools: Allowing teams to choose their tools enhances effectiveness in continuous delivery​​.

7. Flexible Infrastructure: Essential characteristics of cloud computing, like on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service, contribute to infrastructure flexibility​​.

8. Loosely Coupled Architecture: Enables teams to test and deploy applications independently, enhancing speed and value delivery​​.

9. Shifting Left on Security: Incorporating security early in the software delivery lifecycle, including in design and testing phases, is critical for DevOps​​.

10. Test Automation: Involves continuous testing throughout the software delivery lifecycle and practices like test-driven development​​.

11. Test Data Management: Managing test data effectively, ensuring availability and minimizing its quantity, is an important part of automated testing​​.

12. Trunk-Based Development: Involves minimizing active branches in a repository and short lifetimes for branches and forks before merging into the main branch​​.

13. Monitoring and Observability: Essential for understanding system health and enabling teams to debug systems interactively​​.

14. Documentation Quality: High-quality documentation contributes significantly to organizational performance and software delivery​​.

15. Generative Organizational Culture: A culture characterized by good information flow, high cooperation and trust, bridging between teams, and embracing novel solutions is predictive of better IT and organizational performance​​.

16. Streamlining Change Approval: Overly formal change management processes with external approvals can negatively impact software delivery performance​​.

17. Well-being: Employee well-being, which includes aspects like job satisfaction and reduction of deployment pain and burnout, is crucial for organizational performance​​.

18. Organizational Performance: Higher levels of software delivery performance correlate with an organization’s ability to achieve its goals​​.

19. Software Delivery Performance Metrics: Key metrics include lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and time to restore service​​.

DORA’s research provides a comprehensive understanding of how various practices and cultural aspects contribute to the effectiveness of DevOps and organizational success.