DORA metrics
The four DORA metrics measure software-delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change-failure rate. Defined by Google's DORA team via the annual State of DevOps survey, they are the most-cited objective benchmark for engineering-team velocity. Elite teams deploy multiple times per day with lead time under a day; low performers ship monthly with multi-week lead time.
DORA's research linked these four metrics to broader business outcomes (revenue growth, customer satisfaction) across thousands of teams. The metrics work because two are about speed (deployment frequency, lead time) and two are about stability (MTTR, change-failure rate) — improving one without watching the others is how teams accidentally ship faster while breaking more. Modern incident-management + version-control tooling can compute all four automatically from git + deploy logs, so DORA data is increasingly a dashboard-default rather than a survey response.
Long-form posts that explore dora metrics in depth — when to use it, common failure modes, how AI helps.
- BPMN process mining without Celonis moneyCelonis charges $100K-$1M+ for process mining. It's genuinely good. It's also wildly overpriced for 95% of teams. This is the lighter-weight playbook that actually works.9 min read
- The connected delivery graph: one source of truth from PRD to prodMost teams ship software with five tools that don't talk to each other. The friction isn't any individual tool — it's the missing graph between them. This is the case for one connected graph.9 min read
- What's the actual ROI of AI in software delivery?$4-$8 back for every dollar spent within 6 months, for most teams. The honest math from real data, not the deck.7 min read
Related terms
- Lead time
Lead time is the elapsed time from when work is requested (story created, ticket filed) to when it's delivered (deployed to production).
- MTTR
Mean Time To Recovery is the average elapsed time between an incident's detection and its resolution.
- Throughput
Throughput is the count of work items completed per unit of time (typically per week or per sprint).