itsual DORA and Engineering Metrics
Overview
DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, Time to Restore) provide a proven starting point for understanding delivery performance.
When to Use
- Assessing the health of delivery processes
- Setting improvement goals for teams or organizations
- Avoiding vanity metrics that don’t correlate with outcomes
Core DORA Metrics
- Deployment Frequency – How often you deploy to production
- Lead Time for Changes – Time from commit to production
- Change Failure Rate – Percentage of deployments causing failures
- Time to Restore Service – How quickly you recover from failures
Principles
- Use metrics for learning and improvement, not for individual performance punishment
- Pair quantitative metrics with qualitative understanding
- Watch for Goodhart’s law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure)
- Focus on trends and system-level improvement
Verification
- Metrics are collected consistently and understood by teams
- Discussions focus on systemic improvement rather than blame