How Well Is Your Software Team Performing? Meet DORA Metrics

As a software architect, I’ve often struggled with how to measure whether an architecture is helping or hindering software delivery. Are we enabling fast, safe deployments—or introducing bottlenecks? Are our CI/CD pipelines reducing lead time, or are we still stuck in slow, manual processes?

That’s why I’m very interested in DORA metrics—a research-backed framework for measuring DevOps success. Developed by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), the largest and longest-running study of its kind, these four key metrics provide a clear, objective way to understand how well teams are delivering software:

• Deployment Frequency – How often do you deploy to production?
• Lead Time for Changes – How long does it take for a commit to go live?
• Time to Restore Service – When an incident happens, how quickly can you recover?
• Change Failure Rate – How often do deployments cause issues requiring fixes?

DORA’s research, featured in Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, has shown that elite teams:

• Deploy multiple times a day
• Deliver changes in hours (not weeks)
• Recover from failures quickly
• Maintain a low change failure rate

Curious about how your team measures up?

• Take the DORA DevOps Quick Check—a simple five-question assessment.
• Explore more about DORA’s research at dora.dev.
• Read the latest DORA State of DevOps Report for deeper insights.

Have you used DORA metrics in your organization? Have they helped drive improvements?

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