2025 DORA Survey Discussion Guide
The DORA research program is dedicated to helping technology teams get better at getting better. That journey often starts with a moment of reflection.
This guide will help your team get the most out of the 2025 DORA Survey and enable you to start putting insights from the survey into immediate action.
Schedule a one-hour meeting with your extended team or community of practice. Invite everyone who plays a role in your organization’s creation and delivery of software, including, but certainly not limited to, software engineers, data scientists, product managers, quality engineers, site reliability engineers, and devops engineers.
Prework (15 minutes)
All meeting attendees should complete the 2025 DORA Survey prior to joining the discussion. Participants often tell us the survey itself is a valuable self-assessment, sparking immediate ideas for how their team can improve.
By participating, team members will:
- Discover potential improvements for your team just by taking the survey.
- Shape the industry’s understanding of what defines high-performing teams in 2025.
- Help create the benchmark you and your peers will use to drive change.
It is best if this prework is completed immediately prior to the team meeting where you will discuss insights from the survey.
Welcome (5 minutes)
The meeting facilitator welcomes everyone and does a brief check to be sure everyone has completed the prework, taking the 2025 DORA Survey.
Tips for facilitating
Remind everyone that the goal of this discussion isn’t to share their specific answers, but to discuss the thoughts and ideas the questions prompted. The survey was the catalyst; the conversation is the goal.
- Set the Tone: Emphasize curiosity, respect, and a forward-looking perspective. This is a “no-blame” zone.
- Use a Whiteboard: Capture key themes, ideas, and potential experiments as they come up. This validates contributions and creates a visible artifact of the discussion.
- Listen for Themes: As people talk, notice recurring ideas (e.g., “testing bottlenecks,” “unclear requirements,” “deployment anxiety”). You can call these out to help the group focus.
Suggested discussion questions (40 minutes)
Use the questions below as potential discussion questions with the group. You may not have time to get through all of them. Give the group time to share lots of perspectives and insights. Alternatively, use conversations.dora.dev/survey as a guide through the discussion questions.
Pick a selection of the eight questions listed below that you would like to discuss as a group. We strongly recommend that you use at least these two:
Depending on the size of your group, you may want to break out into smaller groups for the discussion and reconvene for the wrap-up and next steps.
The “Aha!” moments
- Question: As you went through the survey, was there a particular question or section that made you pause and think, ‘Hmm, I haven’t considered that before,’ or that felt especially relevant to our team right now? What was it, and why did it stand out?
- Purpose: This is a great icebreaker. It gets people to share a personal moment of reflection without being too intimidating. It immediately surfaces what’s top-of-mind for the group.
Highlighting our strengths
- Question: Which parts of the survey made you feel confident or proud of the way our team works? Where do you think we are already demonstrating the strong capabilities that DORA measures?
- Purpose: It’s crucial to start with positives. This builds psychological safety and acknowledges the good work already being done, framing the discussion around building on strengths rather than just fixing deficits.
Identifying opportunities
- Question: Conversely, what’s a topic or capability from the survey that you feel represents our biggest opportunity for improvement? What friction or challenge did the questions bring to light for you?
- Purpose: This gently moves the conversation toward areas for growth. Using words like “opportunity,” “friction,” or “challenge” is more constructive than “weakness” or “problem.”
Connecting the dots (cross-functional perspective)
- Question: The survey covers the entire delivery process. From your unique role (as an Engineer, PM, QA, etc.), what’s one connection between your work and another part of the process that the survey made you think about differently?
- Purpose: This question is specifically designed to leverage the diverse perspectives in the room. It encourages systems thinking and helps break down silos by showing how different functions are interconnected.
Focusing on well-being
- Question: The survey explicitly asks about developer well-being and team culture. Thinking about those questions, what is one small, practical change we could make to our daily or weekly routines that would positively impact our collective well-being and sustainability?
- Purpose: This addresses the critical human element. By focusing on a “small, practical change,” it makes the problem feel solvable and empowers the team to suggest actionable, low-cost experiments.
Looking ahead
- Question: DORA is looking ahead at topics like AI integration and platform engineering. How did seeing those questions make you think about our team’s readiness for the future? What excites or concerns you about these trends in our context?
- Purpose: This elevates the conversation from current-state reflection to future-state strategy. It allows the team to think proactively about industry shifts and how they might be impacted.
The first small step
- Question: If you had to pick just one theme or idea that this reflection sparked for you, what would be the first small experiment we could run as a team next week to explore it further?
- Purpose: This is the most important question for driving action. It moves the discussion from ideas to commitment. The focus on a “small experiment” aligns with the “get better at getting better” ethos and lowers the barrier to trying something new.
The view from 30,000 feet
- Question: Stepping back, what did you learn about high-performing teams in 2025 simply by the types of questions the DORA research program is asking?
- Purpose: This is a great concluding question. It encourages meta-reflection on the industry benchmarks themselves, helping the team understand the “why” behind these concepts and solidifying the value of the exercise.
Next steps (10 minutes)
End with action
Make sure to leave the last 5-10 minutes to review the “First Small Step” ideas and agree on what you’ll actually try.