Measuring DevOps success? You need to use DORA metrics from the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) framework. These metrics help software teams get better over time.
Think of DORA metrics like the stats used in Formula One racing. In Formula One, teams collect and analyze thousands of metrics before and during each race to optimize car setups, detect potential failures early, and refine strategies for peak performance. Similarly, in software development, teams use metrics to track and improve how they work.
Historically, software performance was measured by simple metrics, such as the number of lines of code developers committed. But now, modern DevOps teams use smarter, more meaningful, and more actionable metrics to evaluate effectiveness.
For companies to thrive, they need quantifiable software metrics that do more than track progress. These metrics should foster continuous improvement, competitiveness, and innovation. That’s why so many organizations use DORA metrics to set their DevOps KPIs — they provide valuable insights into how efficient and productive teams are.
In this blog, I’ll explain what DORA metrics are, how to use them, and how Delphix helps teams make the most these metrics to enhance their DevOps practices.
What Are DORA Metrics?
DORA metrics are a set of measurements used to track how well software teams deliver and manage projects. They help organizations understand the speed and quality of their software development and deployment processes.
Note that the DORA in DORA metrics is different from the DORA in the DORA regulation in the EU:
- DORA metrics: DevOps Research and Assessment metrics.
- DORA regulation: Digital Operational Resilience Act.
There are four key DevOps metrics:
- Deployment Frequency measures how often new code is successfully deployed to production. It shows how quickly the team can adapt and consistently deliver results.
- Lead Time for Changes measures how long it takes for a code change to go from commit to deployment. It reflects the speed and efficiency of the development pipeline.
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) tracks how long it usually takes to fix a service after a failure. It shows how efficiently a team can resolve issues and minimize downtime.
- Change Failure Rate tracks the percentage of deployments that cause problems and need fixing. This helps evaluate how stable and reliable the release process is.
These metrics help software teams work faster, reduce defects, and improve customer satisfaction. Additionally, DORA metrics help increase developer experience (DX) and reduce wasted time and effort.
Why DORA Metrics Matter for Executive Leaders
DORA metrics are more than just numbers — they offer a comprehensive view of the health and efficiency of their DevOps practices. Here's why they matter:
- Actionable Insights: DORA metrics help you spot problems and inefficiencies in your software delivery process, helping you focus on improvements that actually make a difference.
- Measuring Performance: These metrics help organizations see how they measure up to industry standards and top-performing teams.
- Connecting to Business Goals: By focusing on speed and reliability, DORA metrics ensure DevOps practices support bigger business goals like customer satisfaction and faster delivery times.
- Encouraging Improvement: DORA metrics foster a culture of responsibility and growth, driving innovation and stronger performance.
To successfully implement DORA metrics, leadership needs to set the tone by creating a data-driven culture. This helps teams track and improve their performance with real, actionable insights.
Once the decision to use DORA metrics is made, teams usually start with an application or group that has experience with the metrics. Or they start with a simple application of the metrics with few external dependencies.
How to Implement DORA Metrics in DevOps Teams
Implementing DORA metrics takes careful planning and some time to adjust.
The process begins with collecting baseline data to understand current performance. From there, organizations can define realistic, time-bound goals aligned with business objectives.
Many automated tools can make it easier to collect and analyze data. These tools help simplify the process, provide useful insights, and support ongoing improvement.
Fortunately, I’ve found that you can get most metrics in development and testing toolsets:
- Deployment Frequency: Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI/CD.
- Lead Time for Changes: LaunchDarkly, Jira, and Harness.
- Change Failure Rate: Jenkins, TravisCI, and GitLab.
- Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR): Datadog, New Relic, Pager Duty, and Dynatrace.
Some tools can help make it easier to collect DORA metrics and display them on a single dashboard. Examples that I’ve seen include PluralSight Flow, Jellyfish, Haystack, and LinearB. These tools give teams a clear view of their progress and show where they can improve.
How DORA Metrics Improve DevOps Workflows
DORA metrics help link IT performance to business results, making it easier for everyone in the organization to stay aligned.
| DevOps Evolution Stage | ||
Low | Mid | High | |
Deployment Frequency | Monthly or less often | Between daily and weekly | On demand (whenever we want) |
Lead Time for Changes | Between one week and six months | Less than a week | Less than an hour |
Change Failure Rate | Less than a week | Less than a day | Less than an hour |
MTTR | Less than 15% | Less than 15% | Less than 5% |
For example, rather than presenting a 20% drop in software defects as a technical win, showing it as a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction and faster software delivery makes more sense to executive stakeholders. This approach shows how better efficiency creates business value. Faster, more reliable software releases improve the customer experience and help the stay ahead of competitors by delivering market-leading innovations.
DORA helps leaders make smarter decisions with clear, data-driven insights. By using measurable metrics, companies can identify bottlenecks, track performance trends, and make better choices about resources and improvements. Aligning IT capabilities with business goals not only drives operational excellence but also gives the company an edge in fast-changing markets.
How Delphix Supports DORA Metrics
Perforce Delphix helps you automate compliant data for DevOps and implement DORA metrics. Here’s how.
Deployment Frequency
The Delphix DevOps Data Platform integrates into your existing CI pipelines, to make managing data faster, easier, and less expensive.
With an API-first approach, developers can use APIs, or pre-built integrations to provide complete data environments to the pipeline within minutes. These environments can either be torn down after successful testing or kept and shared with others triage issues.
Using production-like data has helped customers reduce defects while speeding up software delivery.
In fact, in the recent study — IDC: The Business Value of Delphix — Delphix users reported a 58% reduction in time to develop a new application. They also reported a 36% increase in applications released annually.
IDC: The Business Value of Delphix
Analyst study of customers shows that the Delphix DevOps Data Platform delivers a 408% 3-year ROI. Discover the tangible benefits of Delphix, validated by IDC analysts.
Lead Time for Changes
Delphix Continuous Data eliminates the bottlenecks associated with shared environments.
Giving each team their own data copy lets developers focus on coding instead of waiting for access or coordinating with others.
Additionally, the size of the data is irrelevant for Delphix. Traditionally small, medium, and large DevOps pipelines won't need to be structured as such; it's all updated in minutes with Delphix. This approach allows data to be:
- Shared seamlessly across teams for rapid defect triaging.
- Integrated into CI pipelines for automated testing.
- Made available through self-service capabilities.
Many organizations I’ve worked with saw a 30% boost in software release velocity after adding Delphix to their CI/CD pipelines.
Mean Time to Recovery
Delphix makes it easy to create quick copies of production databases for troubleshooting, without relying on live production systems.
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan used Delphix to improve recovery and data access times, cutting database copy creation from 1-2 days down to just 5-10 minutes. This time-saver gives teams fast access to accurate, real-time data quickly — keeping critical projects on track while protecting data integrity.
Change Failure Rates
Delphix helps development and testing teams use secure, production-like data with Delphix Continuous Compliance. This approach catches defects earlier in the lifecycle, preventing issues before they reach production.
By fixing issues sooner, organizations can create better software, cut downtime, and stay competitive.
Improve Efficiency With Delphix
Adopting DORA metrics represents a significant leap toward achieving software delivery excellence. They provide a clear pathway to address inefficiencies and drive continuous improvement across teams and processes.
By integrating DORA metrics into your DevOps roadmap and leveraging platforms like Delphix to nurture your transformation, you’ll ensure your organization is equipped to meet the demands of modern software delivery.
Say goodbye to legacy approaches to data delivery that often involve manual processes that take days or weeks. Those approaches create bottlenecks in critical DevOps, test data management, analytics, and AI projects. Delphix on the other hand automates these processes and delivers application data in just minutes. This makes it easy for you to improve on your DORA metrics.
Related blog >> What Is Delphix?
Data Virtualization Transforms Data Delivery Speed, Storage
Delphix syncs with production data sources then instantly provisions space-efficient virtual data copies for non-production use cases. Rather than making and moving new data blocks, Delphix intelligently shares common data blocks across downstream environments over the network.
The result? Delphix accelerates provisioning times by 100x while reducing storage footprints by 10x.
Get Started
Contact us to learn more about how you can improve development efficiency with Delphix.
You’ll find out why industry leaders choose Delphix to deliver the right data to the right teams at the right time.