DORA Metrics: How to Measure Software Delivery Performance

In order to meet these requirements, DevOps teams and lean practitioners constantly need to improve themselves. The most elite DevOps teams deploy an impressive lead time for change in under an hour. Meanwhile, low-performing DevOps teams can take longer than half a year to effectuate a single change. The third principle in the Agile Manifesto talks about “Deliver working software frequently.” Let’s measure how well we do that. Deployment Frequency measures how often an organization successfully releases to production. DORA’s State of DevOps research program represents seven years of research and data from over 32,000 professionals worldwide. Our research uses behavioral science to identify the most effective and efficient ways to develop and deliver software.

Teams define success differently, so deployment frequency can measure a range of things, such as how often code is deployed to production or how often it is released to end users. Regardless of what this metric measures on a team-by-team basis, elite performers aim for continuous deployment, with multiple deployments per day.

Who should avoid DORA metrics? Who should use it for engineering performance?

To measure the frequency, calculate the median number of days per week with at least one successful deployment. At the highest level, Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes measure velocity, while Change Failure Rate and Time to Restore Service ﹣ stability. Naturally, more successful companies tend to do smaller and much more frequent deliveries – or in the world of DevOps, more frequent but smaller deployments. In the next sections below, you will learn more about the four DORA metrics and why they are so useful in value stream management. Try Sumo Logic’s free trial today to see how we can help you reach your goals and maintain quality assurance today.

• That means more frequent, smaller deployments, which makes it easier to track down bugs to a specific version.
• If you want to improve your performance, first determine what KPI you’d like to improve.
• In recent years, value stream management has become an important part of software development.
• As a proven set of DevOps benchmarks, DORA metrics provide a foundation for this process.
• When your teams’ DORA metrics improve, the efficiency of the entire value stream improves along with them.
• While this can have a distorting effect in various contexts, it is actually the desired effect in DevOps – it helps to eradicate inefficient processes and reduces waste.
• Low Time to Restore Service ensures availability and correct functioning of the software.

Learn how each of the metrics works and set the path to boosting your team’s performance and business results. Accelerate, the DORA team identified a set of metrics which they claim indicates software teams’ performance as it pertains to software development and delivery capabilities. Change Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Mean Time to Resolution, and Change Failure Rate.

DORA metrics and Value Stream Management

Mean Lead Time for Changes – measures the time it takes to go from code commit to production. These metrics help leaders understand how their teams are performing now and over time to make data-driven decisions to improve the process, the teams and the applications.

If a high lead time for changes is detected, DevOps teams can install more automated deployment and review processes and divide products and features into much more compact and manageable units. You have structural issues that prevent continuous development, like a customer base that can only accept changes once per quarter. You can still leverage DORA for engineering performance… but the metrics need to be tailored to your span of control. Lead time for changes isn’t a static metric; like deployment frequency, you must select over what time period you’re measuring your lead time, and take the mean number of commits over several periods. Regardless of how you slice the data, DORA defines elite teams as those that deploy multiple times per day, and low-performing teams as those that deploy fewer than once every six months. Non-technical board members and highly-technical contributors should use the same language to understand the engineering team’s productivity. An organization’s particular cultural processes — such as separate test teams or shared test environments — can impact lead time and slow a team’s performance.

What are DORA (DevOps Research and Assessments) Metrics?

DevOps teams that leverage modern operational practices outlined by their SRE colleagues report higher operational performance. Teams that prioritize both delivery and operational excellence report the highest organizational performance. Deployment Frequency measures how often a team pushes changes to production. This indicates how quickly your team is delivering software – your speed. DORA tells us that high performing teams endeavor to ship smaller and more frequent deployments. This has the effect of both improving time to value for customers and decreasing risk for the development team.

• Various tools measure Deployment Frequency by calculating how often a team completes a deployment to production and releases code to end-users.
• Shipping often means the team is constantly perfecting their service and, if there is a problem with the code, it’s easier to find and remedy the issue.
• The third principle in the Agile Manifesto talks about “Deliver working software frequently.” Let’s measure how well we do that.
• Even though DORA metrics provide a starting point for evaluating your software delivery performance, they can also present some challenges.
• There are other common inhibitors to frequency, such as needing to wait for specific employees with the permission to deploy, or lack of testing automation.
• In this context, DORA metrics play a big role as they show what kind of value is delivered to the customer and what performance level is necessary to reach desired business outcomes.
• One approach is to break it down to phases, in a divide-and-conquer fashion, where each phase focuses on just one metric.

By DORA’s standards, high, medium, and low-performing teams all have change failure rates between 16% and 30%, meaning that either your team is elite or not; no other subcategories matter. Whether you’re measuring your deployments by months, weeks, days, or hours, deployment frequency provides insight into how continuous your organization actually is.

State of DevOps Reports

And this is why they value robust observability platforms, like Sumo Logic, to help them measure their objectives and ensure they’re on track to meeting their KPIs, deadlines, and long-term strategies. While it would be nice to live in a world where our change failure rate is zero because we encounter no incidents, that’s not a reality for any software organization I’ve been a part of. DORA defines elite DevOps teams as those who keep their failure rate under 15%.

These additional views helps appraise leading indicators of your ability to deploy to production. Organizations vary in how they define a successful deployment, and deployment frequency can even differ across teams within a single organization.