DORA metrics are the industry standard benchmarks that everyone starts with to understand more about their engineering practices. Developed by the DevOps Research and Assessment team (now part of Google), they provide a clear, research-backed framework for measuring software delivery performance.
The Four Key Metrics
DORA organizes performance into two categories: velocity and stability.
Velocity Metrics
- Deployment Frequency: How often does your organization successfully release to production? High-performing teams deploy on demand, sometimes multiple times per day.
- Lead Time for Changes: How long does it take from code commit to that code running in production? This measures the efficiency of your entire delivery pipeline.
We also track an alternative metric called Time Between Deploys, which works better for legacy environments that are not yet deploying multiple times daily.
Stability Metrics
- Change Failure Rate: What percentage of deployments cause a failure in production? This measures the quality and safety of your release process.
- Time to Restore Service (MTTR): When a failure does occur, how quickly can your team recover? This reflects both your incident response processes and system resilience.
Visibility, Not Micromanagement
The purpose of tracking DORA metrics is visibility, not surveillance. Understanding your performance baselines helps teams identify bottlenecks, celebrate improvements, and make informed decisions about where to invest effort.
When teams can see their own metrics, they self-correct. When leaders can see portfolio-wide trends, they allocate resources more effectively.
DevGrid's New Insights Dashboard
We are excited to announce that DevGrid now automatically tracks all four DORA metrics in real-time through our new insights dashboard. No manual data collection, no spreadsheets, no quarterly reviews, just continuous, up-to-date performance visibility for every team and application in your organization.
Request a demo to see the DORA metrics dashboard in action.