Emily Clarke

What are DORA Metrics?

Creating amazing software applications involves contributions from multiple teams. On one hand, your development team is responsible for writing code and building new features. On the other hand, the operations team maintains the application's infrastructure to ensure it runs smoothly. These two teams are crucial to the success of your application.

However, they often work separately. The siloed nature of these two teams can lead to many issues. DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) created four measurements to maximize success between these two teams. They're known as the DORA Metrics.

What are DORA Metrics, and what do they mean? Read on to find out.

Deployment Frequency

The first DORA Metric is deployment frequency. It measures how frequently teams successfully deploy code into a production environment. Think of it as your teams' throughput that provides insight into how often they're shipping value to customers.

DORA states that successful teams complete smaller deployments more frequently. Therefore, having a high deployment frequency should be a goal.

Mean Lean Time for Changes

This metric measures how long changes take to enter the production environment. Leaders use it to understand how efficient the development process is. The time measurement begins whenever teams commit to making changes and ends upon delivery to customers.

To maximize success, aim to lower this metric.

Change Failure Rate

The change failure rate highlights the percentage of deployments that caused a failure in production. It provides insight into the quality of the code teams deliver. Of course, change failures are something teams should avoid. Failures lead to delays and setbacks that could cost your business money and harm your reputation.

A lower change failure rate means your teams provide top-quality code with a much lower risk of issues.

Time to Recover

Failures happen. They might be rare, but they happen nonetheless. Time to recover is a metric that measures how long it takes for teams to restore a system's functionality. Quick recovery in a production environment is crucial; this metric tests your team's response. It also provides insight into your observability measures.

Author Resource:-

Emily Clarke writes about the different platforms providing high-quality developer and test environments. You can find her thoughts at Kubernetes ecosystem blog.