📖 Business
Four Key Metrics (DORA)
The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are four measures that predict both software delivery performance and organizational performance. Developed through four years of rigorous statistical research by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, these metrics replaced gut-feel maturity models with validated, empirical indicators. The breakthrough finding: speed and stability are not trade-offs. Elite teams are better at all four metrics simultaneously, destroying the "move fast and break things" vs "move slow and be safe" false dichotomy.
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How It Works
The four metrics split into two tempo measures and two stability measures:
Tempo (speed):
- Deployment Frequency — How often you deploy to production. Elite: multiple times per day. Low: between once per month and once every six months.
- Lead Time for Changes — Time from code commit to running in production. Elite: less than one hour. Low: between one month and six months.
Stability (quality):
- Change Failure Rate — Percentage of deployments causing a failure in production. Elite: 0-15%. Low: 46-60%.
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) — How long to restore service after an incident. Elite: less than one hour. Low: between one week and one month.
The research clusters teams into four performance profiles (elite, high, medium, low). The gap between elite and low performers is widening year over year — high performers are accelerating away. Critically, there is no cluster where teams are fast but unstable, or stable but slow. The data shows that the practices enabling speed (automated testing, CI/CD, trunk-based development) are the same practices that enable stability.