Why DORA Metrics Are Crucial for High-Performing Tech Teams

In 2018 the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group published its “State of DevOps” report with insights from analyzing survey responses from over 31,000 professionals worldwide over six years. It identified four key metrics for measuring DevOps performance, known today as the DORA metrics:

• Deployment frequency (DF)
• Change Lead Time (CLT)
• Change failure rate (CFR)
• Mean time to recover (MTTR)

The DORA metrics not only provide a framework for DevOps teams to measure their performance and achieve success but also offer a way for engineering leaders to assess the effectiveness of their software development and delivery processes. Optimizing for these metrics, teams can improve their software development practices and accelerate software delivery. DORA’s data-driven insights and best practices for DevOps operations can help organizations to achieve these goals and improve their software delivery outcomes. In addition, DORA’s identification of performance benchmarks for each metric allows organizations to understand where their performance stands in comparison to Elite, High-Performing, Medium, and Low-Performing teams, providing a valuable benchmark for improvement. Although no longer independent (having been acquired by Google in 2018) DORA remains dedicated to providing these insights and best practices to help organizations of all sizes and types achieve DevOps success.