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.