The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are a set of key performance indicators used to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of your engineering team’s delivery capabilities. These metrics help teams track their ability to deliver software quickly, with high quality, and to recover from issues swiftly. By implementing DORA metrics, organizations can reduce downtime, improve deployment speeds, and gain visibility into the software development lifecycle.
DORA metrics specifically focus on four main areas:
Deployment Frequency - How often your organization deploys changes.
Lead Time for Changes - The time it takes from code commit to release.
Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) - The average time it takes to recover from a failure.
Change Failure Rate - The percentage of deployments causing issues.
Each tier in the DORA metrics scorecard aligns with levels of performance for these metrics, helping your organization target best practices for continuous delivery.
Key Elements to Track for DORA Performance
Each performance level in the DORA framework corresponds to market benchmarks identified by the DORA team in their 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report, representing the different levels of performance and their alignment with industry benchmarks: elite, high and medium performers.
🏅 Gold Tier - Elite Performers
Deployment Frequency -> More than 20 deployments per month (multiple times per day).
Lead Time for Changes -> Less than 24 hours to move changes from commit to production.
Mean Time to Recover -> Incident resolution time averages less than one hour.
Change Failure Rate -> Less than 5% of changes result in downtime or service degradation.
Failed Deployment Recovery Time -> Time to recover from a failed deployment averages less than one hour.
🥈 Silver Tier - High Performers
Deployment Frequency -> At least five deployments per month (around once a week).
Lead Time for Changes -> Between one day and one week to move changes from commit to production.
Mean Time to Recover -> Average resolution time of less than 24 hours.
Change Failure Rate -> Less than 15% of changes lead to downtime or service degradation.
Failed Deployment Recovery Time -> Recovery time from failed deployments averages less than one day.
🥉 Bronze Tier - Medium Performers
Deployment Frequency -> At least one deployment per month.
Lead Time for Changes -> Between one week and one month to move changes from commit to production.
Mean Time to Recover -> Average resolution time of less than one week.
Change Failure Rate -> Less than 30% of changes lead to downtime or service degradation.
Failed Deployment Recovery Time -> Recovery time from failed deployments averages less than one week.
Example DORA metrics scorecard code definition
Example DORA metrics scorecard code definition
{"id":"team-dora-metrics-scorecard","title":"Team DORA Metrics Benchmarks", "description": "DORA metrics remain the most asked about framework for measuring developer productivity. This scorecard is provided by Rely.io to help you assess how your team is faring against the benchmarks of 100s of other companies. After analyzing survey data from 31,000 software professionals worldwide collected over a period of six years, the DORA team identified four key metrics to help DevOps and engineering leaders better measure software delivery efficiency: Deployment frequency, Lead time for changes, Mean time to recovery (now Failed Deployment Recovery Time), Change failure rate.",
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