DORA: Measuring Delivery Performance

If you're interested in understanding how to measure the quality of your software delivery processes, then you've probably heard about DORA. DORA is a DevOps Research and Assessment project from Google that studies what helps teams to improve software delivery and operations performance.

DORA identified four software delivery metrics:
✏️ Deployment Frequency: How often an organization successfully releases to production.
✏️ Lead Time for Changes: The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production.
✏️ Change Failure Percentage: The percentage of deployments that cause failures in production and require hotfixes or rollbacks.
✏️ Failed Deployment Recovery Time: The time it takes to recover from a failed deployment. A lower recovery time indicates a more resilient and responsive system.

DORA’s research demonstrated that speed and stability are not tradeoffs, these metrics are correlated for most teams: top performers do well across all four metrics. The challenge is often to collect fragmented data across different devops tools, but there are some open-source solutions that can simplify the process.

The main pitfall in using DORA's delivery metrics is to set those metrics as the main goal of the teams work. Instead, think of them as a way to measure progress and guide the improvements.

#engineering #devops #delivery