How Do You Become Good at Delivering Software according to DORA metrics?
Published in
1 min readMar 26, 2022
Idea
So how do you become good at delivering software? The Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group found out that the following metrics have a big impact on software delivery performance:
- Deployment frequency: the frequency in which you deploy a new version of the software you’re building. You’re good when this is measured in hours, not days or months.
- Lead time: the time it takes for the customer to request a change until the change is deployed. Since the time to design a solution is often fuzzy, the lead time is often only measured from the moment you start working on implementing the change until the change is deployed. Again, you’re good if this is measured in hours.
- Mean time to restore (MTTR): the mean of the time it takes to restore service after the service was unavailable or impacted in some way. Again, this should be measured in hours.
- Change failure rate: the percentage of deployments that cause problems and impact the service. You’re good if this is below 15%.
These metrics are the so-called “DORA metrics”. You can read everything about them in the Accelerate book written by some of the DORA researchers.
If you want to start one single practice that pushes the needle for all four DORA metrics, you should start using feature flags.
