Complete Guide to DORA Metrics
DORA metrics has become the industry standard engineering metrics for software teams looking to measure delivery performance, engineering efficiency or developer productivity. This is because they measure outcomes, not activities like lines of code written or number of pull requests, and because real-world studies have shown real correlation between these metrics and a team's software delivery performance. When teams track and focus on DORA metrics, they can improve speed without sacrificing reliability. In this guide, learn about what DORA metrics are, how to track them, and how to use them.
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What are DORA metrics?
View AllDORA metrics are a set of four metrics: Deployment Frequency, Change Lead Time, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery or MTTR.
These four metrics are meant to be used together to understand and monitor the quality of your team's execution. Two metrics (deploy frequency and lead time) help you track delivery speed, while the other two metrics (failure rate and MTTR) help you track quality or reliability. By tracking all four you can ensure your team doesn't over-index on speed at the expense of reliability, or vice versa.
Learn more about each DORA metric below.
How to track DORA metrics
View AllDORA metrics come with industry benchmarks data. The DORA Institute - the organization behind the studies - has been compiling data from software teams across industries over the years to define what an elite vs. average team looks like. You can use this data to compare externally, not just internally.
Tracking DORA metrics is straightforward, but not necessarily easy, or cheap to build and maintain in-house. There are commercial options in the market if you choose to buy not build.
In this section you'll learn how to get started on tracking DORA metrics, why accuracy matters when it comes to these metrics, and more.
How to use DORA metrics
View AllThe purpose of measuring any metrics - including DORA metrics - is not only establish baseline, but also make improvements based on the insights surfaced by the metrics.
In this section you can learn about all the ways DORA metrics give you insights on where and how to improve, and answers important questions like “How is my team doing as we scale the team?”, “Are we breaking things more or less often?”, "How efficient have we been in the past few sprints since we made the change?", and so on.