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DORA Metrics: Simple Definitions and What They Measure

DORA Metrics: Simple Definitions and What They Measure

DORA Metrics: Simple Definitions and What They Measure

Introduced by Google, DORA metrics are four key measures for CI/CD maturity of a system and/or team.

1. Deployment Frequency

Definition: How often your team deploys code to production.

Calculation: Count of deployments per time period (per day, week, or month).

What It Measures: The pace at which your team can deliver changes to users.

2. Lead Time for Changes

Definition: How long it takes for code to go from being written to running in production.

Calculation: Time elapsed from code commit to successful deployment in production.

What It Measures: Your team’s ability to respond quickly to needs or issues.

3. Change Failure Rate

Definition: The percentage of deployments that cause failures or require fixes.

Calculation: 100 * deployments with incidents / Total deployments

What It Measures: The quality and stability of your deployments.

4. Time to Restore Service

Definition: How long it takes to fix a problem in production.

Calculation: Time elapsed from incident detection to service restoration.

What It Measures: Team’s ability to recover from incidents and minimize downtime.


These four simple generic metrics gives a quantitative measure of maturity of CI/CD setup for a system/team irrespective of any project/team specific tools, practices or processes.

References

Using the Four Keys to measure your DevOps performance

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