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Understanding DORA Metrics in DevOps

Greg Foster
Greg Foster
Graphite software engineer
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In the realm of DevOps, measuring performance is crucial for continuous improvement and delivering value to customers. The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified four key metrics that serve as benchmarks for assessing software delivery performance:

  1. Deployment frequency: How often an organization successfully releases to production.
  2. Lead time for changes: The amount of time it takes for a commit to be deployed into production.
  3. Change failure rate: The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.
  4. Time to restore service: How long it takes to recover from a failure in production.

These metrics provide insights into the speed and stability of software delivery processes, enabling teams to identify areas for improvement and track progress over time.

Deployment frequency measures how often new code is deployed to production. High-performing teams aim for frequent, smaller deployments to reduce risk and gather feedback rapidly.

Example: A team deploying updates multiple times per day demonstrates a high deployment frequency, allowing for quick iterations and responsiveness to user needs.

This metric assesses the time taken from code commit to its deployment in production. Shorter lead times indicate efficient development and deployment pipelines.

Example: If a developer's commit is deployed within a few hours, the team has a short lead time, reflecting streamlined processes.

Change failure rate calculates the percentage of deployments that result in production failures requiring remediation, such as rollbacks or hotfixes.

Example: If out of 100 deployments, 5 cause failures, the change failure rate is 5%.

This metric measures the time taken to recover from a production failure. Efficient incident response and recovery processes contribute to a shorter time to restore service.

Example: A team that restores service within 30 minutes of an outage demonstrates effective recovery capabilities.

In addition to tracking DORA metrics to assess software delivery performance, teams can gain a more comprehensive understanding of developer productivity by analyzing code review practices. Graphite Insights offers functionalities that support teams in tracking and analyzing these additional metrics:

  • Total PRs merged
  • Average number of PRs merged per person
  • Average number of PRs reviewed per person
  • Median publish to merge time
  • Median review response time
  • Median wait time to first review
  • Average number of review cycles until merge

Graphite Insights also provides:

  • Automated metrics collection: Graphite automates the gathering of data related to code review processes, reducing manual effort and providing real-time insights.​

  • Customizable dashboards: Teams can create dashboards to visualize key performance indicators, such as average PR size, time-to-merge, and team velocity, facilitating a holistic view of the code review process.​ Graphite.dev

  • Actionable feedback: By analyzing collected data, Graphite offers actionable feedback, enabling teams to identify areas for improvement and implement targeted strategies.​

By leveraging Graphite Insights alongside DORA metrics, teams can obtain a holistic view of their development processes, enabling continuous improvement and enhanced software delivery performance.

Understanding and utilizing DORA metrics enables DevOps teams to balance speed and stability in software delivery. By regularly monitoring these metrics, teams can drive continuous improvement, enhance performance, and deliver greater value to customers.

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