AI-assisted software development in 2025: Inside this year's DORA report

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This year's DORA report focuses on AI-assisted software development. While one of the key themes is just how ubiquitous AI is today in software engineering, that's only part of the picture. In fact, the report outlines many of the challenges the adoption of these technologies are posing and explores the barriers and obstacles that need to be addressed to ensure AI-assistance leads to long-term success.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Chris Westerhold — Global Practice Director for Engineering Excellence at Thoughtworks — to discuss this year's DORA report (for which Thoughtworks is a Platinum sponsor). They dive into some of the reports findings, and explore the risks of increasing throughput, the changing demands on software developers, the importance of developer experience and how organizations can go about successfully measuring AI impact.

You can find the 2025 DORA report here: https://cloud.google.com/resources/content/2025-dora-ai-assisted-software-development-report

Read Chris Westerhold's article on this year's findings: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/articles/the-dora-report-2025--a-thoughtworks-perspective

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, everybody, and welcome to another edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast.
0:12.8	My name is Ken McGrage.
0:14.1	I'm one of your regular hosts.
0:16.2	And I have with me today, Chris Westerhold.
0:18.7	Chris, do you want to give people a quick intro?
0:21.5	Great to get on the podcast for the first time. It's great to get everybody else. Chris Westerhold,
0:26.5	I am a global practice director for our engineering excellence offering and really focus a lot on
0:33.1	engineering metrics, engineering insights, platform engineering, you know, driving AI into software delivery lifecycle.
0:40.2	So it's really great to get on here and chat with you.
0:42.0	Cool, good to have you.
0:43.2	So our topic today, we're going to talk about the latest Dora report.
0:47.0	And I have to admit, for me personally,
0:48.8	it's very hard not to call it the state of DevOps report.
0:53.0	Because as many people probably know, that's really where kind of where it came from.
0:57.4	I thought works actually was one of the very early supporters and contributors to it, gosh, 10, 15 years ago, whenever it was.
1:05.1	And then it became more of a peer-reviewed scientific thing.
1:09.5	Dorr was acquired by Google, and Dorr changed it this year.
1:13.6	And it's the state of AI-assisted software development report.
1:16.9	And we're still happy to be actually the platinum sponsor of it.
1:20.8	So we very firmly believe in solid research-driven metrics.
1:26.4	But as always, that won't affect our opinion much.
1:30.5	That's right.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 17 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Thoughtworks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Thoughtworks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.