If you're looking to understand and improve your team's software delivery performance, DORA metrics are the gold standard. This guide explains each of the four key metrics identified by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team, how to benchmark your team, and practical steps to improve.
The DORA team revolutionized how we measure software delivery performance. Their six years of research identified four key metrics that differentiate high-performing organizations from low performers.
At Velocinator, we believe these metrics are foundational for any modern engineering team.
The Four DORA Metrics Explained
1. Deployment Frequency
How often does your organization deploy code to production or release it to end users?
- Elite: On-demand (multiple deploys per day)
- Low: Between once per month and once every 6 months
How to improve: Automate your CI/CD pipeline. If deploying is painful, you'll do it less often. Make it boring and routine.
2. Lead Time for Changes
How long does it take to go from code committed to code successfully running in production?
- Elite: Less than one hour
- Low: Between one month and six months
How to improve: Break work into smaller batches. Large PRs take longer to review, longer to test, and are riskier to deploy.
3. Time to Restore Service (MTTR)
How long does it take to restore service when a service incident or a defect that impacts users occurs?
- Elite: Less than one hour
- Low: More than one week
How to improve: Invest in observability. You can't fix what you can't see. Also, practice incident response with game days.
4. Change Failure Rate
What percentage of changes to production or released to users result in degraded service and subsequently require remediation?
- Elite: 0-15%
- Low: 46-60%
How to improve: Shift testing left. Catch bugs in unit tests and integration tests before they reach staging, let alone production.
Why DORA Metrics Work Together
You can't just optimize one. If you optimize for Deployment Frequency but ignore Change Failure Rate, you'll just be shipping broken code faster. If you optimize for Change Failure Rate but ignore Lead Time, you'll never ship anything because you're too afraid of breaking things.
The magic happens when you balance them. High performers optimize for stability AND speed.
Tracking DORA Metrics Automatically with Velocinator
Manual tracking of these metrics is tedious and error-prone. Velocinator integrates directly with your GitHub repositories and Jira projects to calculate these metrics automatically.
We map:
- Deployments from GitHub Releases or deployments API
- Incidents from Jira bugs or PagerDuty alerts
- Changes from Pull Requests
Stop guessing how your team is performing. Start measuring.
For a deep dive into one of the most impactful DORA metrics, see our guide on measuring MTTR and incident response. And to understand how these metrics connect to day-to-day developer work, read about PR cycle time.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What are the four DORA metrics?
- The four DORA metrics are Deployment Frequency (how often you deploy), Lead Time for Changes (time from commit to production), Time to Restore Service/MTTR (how fast you recover from incidents), and Change Failure Rate (percentage of deployments causing issues).
- What is considered 'elite' performance in DORA metrics?
- Elite performers deploy on-demand (multiple times per day), have lead times under one hour, restore service in under one hour, and maintain a change failure rate of 0-15%.
- How do I start tracking DORA metrics?
- Start by integrating your CI/CD pipeline, version control, and incident management tools. Velocinator automates DORA metric tracking by connecting to GitHub and Jira to calculate these metrics without manual effort.
