**DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment)** metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that help measure the performance and effectiveness of software development and delivery teams, especially in a DevOps context. They focus on four primary metrics that are linked to a company’s ability to deliver high-quality software quickly and reliably. These metrics are:
### 1. **Deployment Frequency (DF)**
- **What it measures**: How often new code is deployed to production.
- **Goal**: The higher the deployment frequency, the better, as it shows that teams are continuously delivering value.
- **High-performing teams**: Deploy multiple times a day.
### 2. **Lead Time for Changes (LT)**
- **What it measures**: The amount of time it takes from committing a change to having it successfully deployed in production.
- **Goal**: A shorter lead time indicates efficient development and release processes.
- **High-performing teams**: Usually have lead times of less than a day.
### 3. **Mean Time to Restore (MTTR)**
- **What it measures**: How long it takes to recover from a failure in production.
- **Goal**: Shorter MTTR indicates faster recovery from incidents, which reduces downtime and impacts on users.
- **High-performing teams**: Can typically recover within less than an hour.
### 4. **Change Failure Rate (CFR)**
- **What it measures**: The percentage of changes that result in a failure in production (e.g., an incident or the need for a rollback).
- **Goal**: Lower is better, as fewer changes should introduce problems into the system.
- **High-performing teams**: Have failure rates of 0-15%.
### Importance of DORA Metrics:
These metrics help organizations assess the effectiveness of their DevOps practices, providing insights into both the stability and speed of their software delivery pipelines. Organizations with higher DORA metrics are typically more agile, delivering value more frequently and responding to incidents more quickly, which in turn boosts business outcomes like customer satisfaction and revenue.
By focusing on improving DORA metrics, teams can reduce bottlenecks, ensure faster delivery of features, and enhance system reliability.