The Research Reveals A Critical Truth

This year’s DORA report (no longer the State of DevOps) - the State of AI-assisted Software Development - has highlighted something we’ve been hearing rumblings of elsewhere, but with a specific angle of amplification.

The research reveals a critical truth: AI’s primary role in software development is that of an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organizations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones.

MIT’s earlier study focused on the enterprise named organizational challenges like flawed integration, lack of deep workflow adaptation, and misallocation of resources (such as focusing on sales and marketing AI tools instead of back-office automation).

Another highlight from MIT was that a great deal of AI value is realized informally through employee-driven “shadow AI” rather than formal pilots.

DORA’s report also highlights the vaccine to all the AI risks revealed by reports to date: Value Stream Mapping

Our analysis validates this hypothesis. While AI adoption on its own shows a modest impact, the effect is dramatically amplified in organizations with strong VSM practices.

Value Stream Mapping provides visibility across large swaths of the organization and insight into where AI will provide the highest ROI.

When a team collectively maps out a system, it gets all those details out of their heads and into a shared space. Suddenly, the system’s structure—and any hidden patterns—become obvious. This visibility makes it much easier to have a real conversation about what’s working and what isn’t. At its core, this is exactly what VSM is all about.

This doesn’t come out of nowhere. DORA has included practices like Value Stream Mapping for years now, and it’s always been a key capability along with Visual Management generally in driving high performance. Thoughtworks, a platinum sponsor of the report, has listed Path to Production Mapping as a key capability since 2022 (in the top spot!). In their content, they highlight the main point of caution that has been ignored by almost everyone looking for developer productivity from AI:

There’s been so much talk about AI accelerating development, it’s about time we had some conversation and data about how accelerating outside your constraint is a bad idea.

So, what?

AI use and integration is just spreading and accelerating, and pressure is mounting to make the right investments. If you want to make those investments really matter, let’s chat about how you can quickly get a view of your value streams and value stream network, to plug in AI where it will have the greatest ROI for you and your organization.

If you’re thinking: "Yeah, I know VSM is important and valuable, and I want that visibility, engagement, and measurement, but I’m not any closer to getting it done” I have a lot to share to help you over the hump. Beyond Flow Engineering, the community of practitioners and facilitators has been building up new practices, templates, and guidance to support you!

Value Stream Mapping is an essential capability, but it doesn’t have to be intimidating, chaotic, exhausting, or unproductive. If you want to start benefiting from Value Stream Management, get in touch with me right now!

To see how DORA and Value Stream Mapping go together in further detail, check out Andrew & Rob’s session earlier this year:

Helen’s post highlights the current confusion/conflation of Value Stream Mapping and Value Stream Management, but it’s great to see a higher level of awareness and the data now reflected in DORA’s research to support what we’ve been saying since the early days of the VSMC.

Read the VSM Excerpt here:

I’ll leave you with a great challenge posed by the DORA team:

And we can go even further: Can you draw your full End-to-End value stream on a whiteboard?