four DORA metrics
also: DORA, DevOps Research and Assessment metrics
DORA metrics are four key performance indicators used to measure software delivery and organizational performance: Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recovery, and Change Failure Rate.
DORA stands for DevOps Research and Assessment. These four metrics were identified by Google's research team as the strongest predictors of high-performing software organizations.
Deployment Frequency measures how often code changes are deployed to production. Lead Time for Changes tracks how long it takes from committing code to deploying it live. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) measures how quickly a team can restore service after a production incident. Change Failure Rate calculates the percentage of deployments that cause failures requiring a fix or rollback.
For example, a high-performing team might deploy multiple times per day (high frequency), merge code to production within hours (low lead time), recover from outages in minutes (low MTTR), and have less than 15% of changes cause incidents (low failure rate).
DORA metrics help organizations move beyond vanity metrics and focus on delivering value reliably and sustainably. They are widely adopted in DevOps and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.