Lesson 23 / 23

Measuring Delivery: DORA Metrics

Track deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and time to restore to judge how healthy your delivery pipeline is.

Four key metrics

The DORA research identifies four metrics that predict delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service. The first two measure speed; the last two measure stability.

Use the metrics to find bottlenecks, not to rank people. Improving one while ignoring the others, such as shipping faster by skipping tests, usually backfires.

Quick check

Quick check: Which DORA metric measures stability?

  • Change failure rate
  • Deployment frequency
  • Lead time for changes
  • Number of commits
Answer

Change failure rate — Change failure rate and time to restore measure stability.