One of the top researchers in the field of DevOps, a term that combines development and operations, will be joining GitHub from Google Cloud.
On Thursday, GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, announced that it hired Dr. Nicole Forsgren as its new vice president of research and strategy.
With a background in academia, Forsgren is known for founding DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), which does research on how developer teams can be more productive. In 2018, Google Cloud acquired DORA, and Forsgren had been working there to help lead research and strategy.
Forsgren starts at GitHub on March 30, and there, she will do research on the open source community, developer productivity, and related topics..
"There's really no better place to continue this work," Forsgren told Business Insider. "That's really what the heart of my work is going to be doing."
Forsgren says that with GitHub, she saw an opportunity to expand on the work she started at DORA — given that GitHub is where a community of over 40 million developers goes to get their work done. She says this gives her a platform to reach more developers and enterprises than she might have as an academic.
"As I thought about kind of expanding on my work to touch more people and to make this work accessible and available for peoples and teams and organizations, GitHub was really this amazing opportunity and this logical next step," Forsgren said.
Similar to Google Cloud, Forsgren will focus on researching open source developer productivity and well-being. At GitHub, she will also do research on systems and tools. She says GitHub can use this data and insights to improve its product and community.
'They want to find a way to help developers of all abilities'
Forsgren says she learned about the opportunity through conversations she had with people she has known for several years, including people at GitHub.
"It was a handful of discussions around the opportunities that I see in developer productivity, developer happiness, and what something like that might look like," Forsgren said. "It was interesting because it was an organic conversation and what might something look like and would I be interested in. It kind of went from there."
She also liked that GitHub is working to be more accessible to developers, and that most of its users live outside the US. Forsgren says one challenge will be coordinating and prioritizing research across several teams to ask the most impactful research questions, especially since GitHub is growing.
"They don't want to address only elite developers," Forsgren said. "They want to find a way to help developers of all abilities. If I am helping to guide research and strategy for this kind of platform and product, that is something else that has been really exciting for me."
'I'm kind of nerding out'
In October, former Google Cloud engineering leader Rachel Potvin also joined GitHub as its vice president of engineering and data. Forsgren says she will work with Potvin, as well as other GitHub teams in engineering, product, marketing, and communications.
"That's also what makes something like this so compelling for me and so exciting because it really is about improving and helping everyone get better across the GitHub community and the whole industry," Forsgren said. "For me, it feels like an extension of my work at DORA and reaching back into my work as an academic."
Within Google, she has been working on handing off her work to other research teams. Forsgren doesn't start at GitHub until the end of the month, but she says in the meantime, she'll be having lots of "Diet Cokes, naps, and ice cream."
"The opportunity to find ways to grow this research and stretch this research in new and compelling ways is so exciting," Forsgren said. "Working with the leadership teams and GitHub teams, I'm kind of nerding out. This is exciting for me."
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