In software development, DevOps’s ability to improve team velocity and project stability is well-established. Various organizations have been able to define their DevOps strategy, following which, they have been able to transform their software development practices entirely. However, since business requirements keep changing, as does the scope for development, there has been a lack of a set standard for assessing DevOps implementations — until recently. After six years of research conducted by the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessments) team, we now have a guide to measure the performance and success of engineering teams.
This article will go into the depths of DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics, identify their benefits, and find out how you can leverage them to boost your dev team’s productivity and implement effective changes.
What are DORA Metrics?
DORA engineering metrics are a set of parameters that have become the industry standard for highlighting the performance of a software development team and tracking the engineering team’s success. As per Google’s DORA team, which spent years researching this domain, there are four key metrics that, when used effectively, can significantly improve engineering management in an organization:
Lead Time for Changes
Lead time is the total time taken for a commit to go into production since the initial feature request from the customer. This metric is beneficial in identifying the tempo and speed of your software delivery routine.
Time To Restore Service (or Mean Time To Recover)
This metric is a measure of time. When system failures occur, a system failure being anything from a bug in production to the entire production system crashing, the time to restore service is practically how long it takes for your team to recover from a shortfall in production and resolve any incident.
Downtime is a critical business issue, so the quicker teams can recover from it, the better, as it reflects a team’s capabilities to recover by identifying and correcting the diagnosis.
Change Failure Rate
Change failure rate is the rate of deployments or changes made to an application or service where the changes led to a production failure and rollbacks. This is a measure of quality, and a 0-15% change failure rate indicates high-performing teams.
Change failure rate can be improved by ensuring that new code is covered by automated unit tests and improving the automated testing process.
Deployment Frequency
Deployment frequency refers to how often an organization deploys code for an application or a service. High-performing organizations have high deployment frequencies, usually with small deployments. And this is a crucial software delivery objective as it ensures the delivery value of the product. It also helps with developer insight by identifying developer productivity levels and your team’s efficiency as a whole.
For all practical purposes, the DORA metrics serve as a means to understand whether an organization has become better at DevOps than in the year-ago period. According to a recent report, post-DORA adoption, elite performers have grown to almost 20% of the survey participants, whereas high performers take up 23%. This has led engineering and DevOps managers to adopt these metrics to improve their software delivery performance.
Why you should track DORA Metrics
There are various reasons why DORA metrics have become a widely accepted methodology for understanding an organization’s engineering team performance. Perhaps the simplest reason to adopt DORA metrics in your company would be to support DevOps leaders in assessing their team velocity and the project stability or quality.
DORA metrics also help align strategic business goals with your software development goals. From the product management perspective, the development of team performance must be adjusted to meet customer demands. These metrics have a clear business value on multiple fronts, just as they let you get a closer look at your engineering team’s performance.
How dev Teams Measure and Improve their DORA Metrics
While measuring and managing their dev team performance, organizations need to consider their available resources, including time, just as they must take unusual events into context. Plus, performance management also demands consistent measurement over time to factor in the results based on context. This helps identify failures in automation, lack of tooling during deployments, or a change in your planning or architecture.
It is also important to note that organizations that use DORA metrics across all teams gain additional software engineering insights, which further prompts discussions and paves the way for an improved delivery timeline.
With that in mind, here’s how dev teams use different DORA metrics:
Lead Time For Changes
This metric requires dev teams to measure the time it takes for pull requests to go to production and then calculate the average of those times. Here’s how you can minimize the lead time for changes:
- Break larger tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks
- Ensure the CI/CD process is efficient and the deployment process automated to a reasonable degree.
Time To Restore Service
Generally, dev teams track the time to restore by measuring the average time between a production bug report being created and being resolved or the fix is deployed to production. Here’s how to improve it:
- Work on an automated process for recovering from failure
- Prioritize failure recovery over other tasks
Change Failure Rate
The change failure rate is calculated simply by counting the number of times a deployment results in a failure and dividing it by total deployments to get an average. Teams can lower this number in the following ways:
- By automating unit tests
- By improving automated tests
- By being thorough with code reviews
Deployment Frequency
This metric is often automated and requires the dev team to have a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tool that provides insight into its activity. Here’s how to improve this metric:
- Improve coverage of automated tests
- Integrate CI/CD tools
- Reduce error recovery time
Improve your Engineering team’s Performance and Productivity with Hatica
It is essential to understand that just like other industrial procedures like manufacturing and production, software delivery releases can and should be tracked and improved.
Hatica’s engineering analytics platform offers visualization of your team’s DORA metrics to help analyze end-to-end software development lifecycle. The customizable dashboards enable engineering managers to measure and manage their dev team performance and take prompt actions to fine-tune productivity based on the delivery timeline. Hatica equips engineering leaders with comprehensive visibility into all aspects of their engineering team’s activities, bottlenecks, and challenges, thereby providing a complete picture of team effectiveness, productivity, and well-being.
Find out more about how Hatica’s engineering analytics platform helps engineering leaders promote effort alignment and improve developer productivity. Request a demo today 🡪
