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Software Development

What is DORA Metrics?

Quick answer

Four measures of software delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.

DORA Metrics, explained

DORA metrics come from the DevOps Research and Assessment program, which studied thousands of technology teams and published its findings in annual State of DevOps reports and the book Accelerate. The research found that these four metrics together indicate how quickly and safely a team delivers software.

Deployment frequency and lead time for changes measure speed. Change failure rate and time to restore service measure stability. For example, a team might learn it deploys once a month and takes three weeks to get a small fix into production, prompting investment in automated testing and smaller releases. The metrics are most useful for tracking a team's own improvement over time. Used as targets for comparing or ranking teams, they can encourage gaming instead of genuine improvement.

Related terms

CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment: practices that automatically build, test, and release code changes.

DevOps

A culture and set of practices that unite software development and IT operations to deliver software faster and more reliably.

Developer Experience

How easy, efficient, and pleasant it is for software developers to do their work with a given set of tools, processes, and platforms.

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