Measuring DORA

As a Director of Engineering, I've become very keen on measuring productivity. I’ve been researching and following a handful of companies that seem to be springing up to support developer productivity.

DORA stands for DevOps Research & Assessment Program.

4 Key Metrics:

• 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

Companies with Tooling to support DORA and others metrics:

• LinearB is putting out a ton of articles / white papers on DORA.

• Haystack is another company that I’ve been hearing/learning about playing in this space.

• Pluralsight, whom I have come across when looking for education/training for developers, has a product called Flow.

At work, we are picking up a JIRA plugin called Time in Status, which will give you some data about how long each ticket is in status. I’m hoping to recreate some reports around Cycle Time. It’s a starting point and a step in the right direction. I will share my experience as we progress in this area.

I’m interested in how others are utilizing DORA and if it has been a success for them.