DORA Metrics: 4 Ways to Measure Software Delivery Performance 2023

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In their 2018 book, 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. Keep in mind that the DORA metrics are a measurement of performance, not goals.

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The rest of our time is spent reviewing other people’s code, updating Jira tickets, writing status updates, sorting through Slack noise and attending meetings. These tasks have a negative correlation to PR review time, code churn, DORA metrics and planning accuracy. Once you know how your teams are performing, it helps to compare your metrics against industry benchmarks.

Change Failure Rate (CFR), Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) & Outcomes

In order to meet these requirements, DevOps teams and lean practitioners constantly need to improve themselves. Over time the metric provides insights on how much time is spent on fixing bugs versus delivering new code. To measure the frequency, calculate the median number of days per week with at least one successful deployment. Smaller and more frequent deployments are the target, but the most effective number of deployments will differ from product to product. Delivering code quickly to production comes from shipping as many times as possible while changing the batch size to be as small as possible. Deployment Frequency depicts the consistency and speed of software delivery.

The trickiest piece for most teams is in defining what a failure is for the organization. Too broad or too limiting of a definition and you will encourage the wrong behaviors. In the end, the definition of failure is and needs to be unique to each organization, service, or even team.

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If deployment frequency is high, it might reveal bottlenecks in the development process or indicate that projects are too complex. 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. One should be careful not to let the quality of their software delivery suffer in a quest for faster changes.

While a low LTC may indicate that a team is efficient, if they can’t support the changes they’re implementing or they’re moving at an unsustainable pace, they risk sacrificing the user experience. Rather than compare the team’s Lead Time for Changes to other teams’ or organizations’ LTC, one should evaluate this metric over time and consider it an indication of growth (or stagnancy). DORA metrics have now become the standard for gauging the efficacy of software development teams and can provide crucial insights into areas for growth. These metrics are essential for organizations looking to modernize and those looking to gain an edge against competitors. Below, we’ll dive into each metric and discuss what they can reveal about development teams.

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These metrics are considered key indicators of the efficiency and efficacy of an enterprise’s DevOps practices. By monitoring these metrics, organisations can identify areas for improvement and track progress over time. Technically I found the biggest bucket in Change Lead Time is testing. Teams will often have test as a separate step in a release process, which means that you add days or even weeks to your change lead time. Instead of having it as a separate action, integrate your testing into your development process. Have your testers teach your developers how to write automated tests from the beginning so that you don’t need a separate step.

  • Another area to focus on could be breaking changes down into smaller chunks, and creating smaller pull requests (PRs)‌, or improving overall Deploy Volume.
  • By comparing all four key metrics, one can evaluate how well their organization balances speed and stability.
  • But counterintuitively, it works the exact opposite way, which is the more you’re changing production with smaller changes, the better understood each of those changes are.
  • Instead of having it as a separate action, integrate your testing into your development process.
  • 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.

Organizations can track their CFR over time and compare it against benchmarks from other organizations in the same industry. This helps identify areas where their change processes can be improved. It also provides insight into potential causes of failure, such as a lack of resources or training for personnel involved in making changes to the system. Over the past eight years, more than 33,000 professionals around the world have taken part in the Accelerate State of DevOps survey, making it the largest and longest-running research of its kind. Failures happen, but the ability to quickly recover from a failure in a production environment is key to the success of DevOps teams. Improving MTTR requires DevOps teams to improve their observability so that failures can be identified and resolved quickly.

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Change Failure Rate (CFR) measures the percentage of changes that result in an incident that requires a rollback. It is calculated by dividing the number of change-related incidents that require a rollback by the total number of changes deployed. MTTR is important for organisations that rely on technology to provide their services, as it can impact the availability and reliability of those services. https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ By monitoring and reducing MTTR, organisations can improve their ability to respond to and recover from incidents and increase the availability of their services. Deployment frequency might be defined differently in different organizations, depending on what is considered a successful deployment. Lead time for changes is the amount of time it takes a code change to get into production.

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Along with Deployment Frequency, it measures the velocity of software delivery. By measuring the velocity of development and stability of deployment and the product itself, teams are motivated to improve their results during subsequent iterations. There are several best practices that teams can employ to reduce the amount of time it takes to restore service after an incident. Through six years of research, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified four key metrics that indicate the performance of software delivery.

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Like the change failure rate metric, this data can be retrieved from any spreadsheet or incident management system, as long as each incident maps back to a deployment. Change Failure Rate is a true measure of the quality and stability of software delivery. It captures the percentage of changes that were made to a code that then resulted in incidents, rollbacks, or any type of production failure. Earlier, we mentioned DORA metrics and their importance in value stream management. Companies who streamline their development and delivery process increase the value software delivers and are more successful in the long run.

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Your team may be moving quickly, but you also want to ensure they’re delivering quality code — both stability and throughput are important to successful, high-performing DevOps teams. 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. A low dora 4 Change Failure Rate shows that a team identifies infrastructure errors and bugs before the code is deployed. It’s a sign of a sound deployment process and delivering high-quality software. DORA uses its metrics to identify Elite, High, Medium, and Low performing teams. They claim that Elite teams are twice as likely to meet or exceed the performance goals of the organization.

Mean Lead Time for Changes

This helps you visualize the engineering work in the context of end-to-end value delivery. It is calculated by counting the number of deployment failures and then dividing it by the total number of deployments. The metric is important as it encourages engineers to build more robust systems. It is usually calculated by tracking the average time between a bug report and the moment the bug fix is deployed.

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