Nicole Forsgren - Episode 81

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts software development productivity expert Nicole Forsgren, Senior Director of Developer Intelligence at Google. Forsgren co-founded DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), a Google Cloud team that utilizes opinion polling to improve software delivery and operations performance. Forsgren also serves on the ACM Queue Editorial Board. Previously, she led productivity efforts at Microsoft and GitHub, and was a tenure track professor at Utah State University and Pepperdine University. Forsgren co-authored the award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps and the recently published Frictionless: 7 Steps to Remove Barriers, Unlock Value, and Outpace Your Competition in the AI Era. In this interview, Forsgren shares her journey from psychology and family science to computer science and how she became interested in evidence-based arguments for software delivery methods. She discusses her role at Google utilizing emerging and agentic workflows to improve internal systems for developers. She reflects on her academic background, as the idea for DORA emerged from her PhD program, and her time at IBM. Forsgren also shares the relevance of the DORA metrics in a rapidly changing industry, and how she's adjusting her framework to adapt to new AI tools.