DORA metrics

DORA metrics are four measures of software delivery performance defined by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program, now part of Google Cloud. Two measure throughput: deployment frequency and lead time for changes. Two measure stability: change failure rate and time to restore service, which recent DORA reports call failed deployment recovery time.

How to calculate it

• Deployment frequency: production deploys per day, week or month.

• Lead time for changes: time from a commit to that commit running in production.

• Change failure rate: failed deployments divided by total deployments. If 3 of 40 deploys in a month cause an incident or rollback, the rate is 7.5%.

• Recovery time: time from a failed deployment to restored service.

Track the median for time-based metrics, since a few outliers skew the average.

Why it matters in production

DORA metrics show whether delivery speed is coming at the cost of stability. They are useful as trends inside one team and become harmful when used as targets or to compare teams. A high deploy count with long lead times can hide a slow pipeline.

See also

• Platform engineering

• GitOps

• Site reliability engineering

• Error budget

On the One2N blog

• DORA metrics: useful or fluff

• DORA metrics or theatrics? What to measure, what to ignore, and how to improve

References

1. Origin of the term

2. DORA's software delivery metrics (dora.dev)