DORA Metrics (A guide from my experience)
What is DORA?
DORA (Not la Exploradora) is the acronym for DevOps Research and Assessment, a community led by Google. Where team performance analysis metrics have been defined, with them in hand the teams will be able to take a series of measures trying to improve their performance.
With the common goal of helping teams reduce the time it takes to bring changes to production, reducing the possibility of introducing errors and without losing quality during the process.
But what is DevOps?
DevOps is a philosophy and set of practices that bring development and operations teams together to deliver software faster and more efficiently.
Using this as a starting point, let’s imagine a human body is made up of different systems that work together to keep the body alive. DevOps is similar in that it brings development and operations teams together to keep software alive and running.
What are the DORA Metrics?
These are the metrics we are going to analyze in detail about each of them individually.
Deployment Frequency (DF) How many times does your team deploy to production? Are we talking about the range of weeks? Maybe days? Hours?. This time interval is one of the metrics that allows us to know how quickly a team is able to bring new changes to production.
Lead Time for Changes (LT) Do you work in a team where each member works asynchronously, subsequently creating a Pull-Request with the changes to be reviewed? Or, on the contrary, do you work in a team where techniques such as pair programming are applied where Pull-Requests do not exist and the changes are taken directly to the main branch?
Change Failure Rate (CFR) The first two metrics seek to reflect how quickly a team can deliver value; however, they will allow us to know how reliable the changes that the team brings to production are.
Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) Surely you have ever experienced a production deployment in which something goes wrong and it is necessary to go back to the previous version. This process is known as rollback and depending on the equipment the time required to restore a previous version can vary from the range of seconds to even hours.
Why are DORA Metrics relevant?
The existence of these metrics is very important, since it allows us to assess in a standardized and objective way what the status of the teams is regarding their development phase. Previously, this assessment, not having this type of metrics, was very subjective, which caused some teams to think that everything was fine within their engineering teams when the reality was quite different.
Achieving good metrics will be a great indicator for teams in terms of delivering value more frequently, with higher quality and in the shortest time possible. Something that is undoubtedly a super positive indicator for any engineering team.
What is the DORA community?
The DORA community provides opportunities to learn, discuss and collaborate on software delivery and operational performance. Enable a culture of continuous improvement.
You can get more information https://dora.community/
My experience as part of the DORA community is a roller coaster of possibilities to help improve the process. Apart from starting each meeting with a geek song.
Being able to collaborate on topics that add value to those of us who are searching for DevOps improvements, such as participating in the preparation of the State of DevOps acceleration report (https://dora.dev/publications/) and meeting people who In addition to being geniuses, they are wonderful people.
P.S.
Amanda is the best
