Four Key Metrics

Four Key Metrics for DevOps success. Through six years of research, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified four key metrics that indicate the performance of a software development team: Deployment Frequency—How often an organization successfully releases to production; Lead Time for Changes—The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production; Change Failure Rate—The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production; Time to Restore Service—How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance

• lead time is measuring the time from developer commit to deployment - see also broader cycle time

There's a rubric to score the org as elite/high/medium/low on each of the 4 metrics.

Four key metrics | Technology Radar | Thoughtworks

Adopt We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items. We use them when appropriate on our projects.

We're still big proponents of these metrics, but we've also learned some lessons. We're still observing misguided approaches with tools that help teams measure these metrics based purely on their continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. In particular when it comes to the stability metrics (MTTR and change fail percentage), CD pipeline data alone doesn't provide enough information to determine what a deployment failure with real user impact is.

Before spending weeks building up sophisticated dashboard tooling, consider just regularly taking the DORA quick check in team retrospectives. This gives the team the opportunity to reflect on which capabilities they could work on to improve their metrics, which can be much more effective than overdetailed out-of-the-box tooling.