Chapter 2: Implement DORA Metrics
This chapter of The 5 Stages of Engineering Excellence looks at DORA Metrics.
If you aren’t familiar, DORA software metrics are a result of six years of surveys conducted by the DevOps Research and Assessments (DORA) team. After thousands of surveys, the DORA team introduced a set of standardized development metrics which have become a standard of measurement for those responsible for measuring DevOps performance.
Implementing the four DORA metrics should be the basis for all organizations to begin their journey to software engineering excellence.
There are two key questions that can be answered using DORA. What is the velocity and quality of the code that a software engineering team is delivering? Within these two themes are four key metrics.
- Deployment Frequency — How often an organization successfully releases to production.
- Lead Time for Change — The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production.
- Change Failure Rate — The percentage of deployment causing a failure in production.
- Time to Restore Service — How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production.
But implementing even these four key software development metrics can be a challenge. To understand metrics such as “Lead Time for Change,” data from multiple sources is required. In this case, data from a continuous delivery system such as Jenkins along with data from an SCM and Jira is required. For a metric like “Time to Restore Service” data from systems like PagerDuty, GitHub, Jenkins, and Jira will be required. These systems may also vary from team to team given a team’s DevOps toolchain selections.
Given this highly complex problem statement, companies are looking for solutions that will provide out-of-the-box solutions which will provide industry-standard software metrics while also providing capabilities across the diverse landscape of DevOps tools.
But this is only the beginning and once a finite set of metrics are implemented from out-of-the-box solutions, these organizations will undoubtedly also require additional capabilities to extend the development metrics available and also provide insight to multiple audiences from executive leadership to team leadership, program managers and ultimately the engineering teams themselves.
Utilizing a platform such as the Harness Software Engineering Insights can provide support for the diverse DevOps toolsets along with the flexibility to adapt, combine and formulate analytics appropriate to each given audience. Harness offers out-of-the-box dashboards for standardized software metrics such as DORA, and it also provides the flexibility and adaptability to not only visualize the metrics required in your organizations but also provide predictive analytics and orchestration to take action upon those analytics.
Check out a live demo of how we can help you transform your engineering organization!