DORA Metrics: The 4 Keys to DevOps Success

Introduction

How do you know if your engineering team is performing well? For years, leaders relied on subjective judgments or scattered KPIs. Enter DORA metrics: a set of four data-backed indicators that have become the global standard for measuring software delivery performance.

In this blog, we’ll explain what DORA metrics are, why they matter, and how you can measure and improve them in your organization.

What Are DORA Metrics?

Developed by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team, the four DORA metrics are:

• Deployment Frequency: how often you release code into production.
• Lead Time for Changes: how long it takes for a commit to reach production.
• Change Failure Rate: the percentage of deployments that result in an incident.
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): how quickly you recover from production failures.

Important: These four metrics together provide a balanced view of both speed and stability.

Why Do DORA Metrics Matter?

Research from the DORA team (and validated in the State of DevOps Report) shows that teams excelling in DORA metrics:

• Deliver software faster,
• Reduce risk,
• And achieve higher organizational performance overall.

In other words: improving DORA metrics is directly tied to business outcomes.

How to Measure DORA Metrics

Deployment Frequency
Best measured via CI/CD tools that track deployments per day/week/month.

Lead Time for Changes
Measure from code commit to production deployment using GitHub or JIRA timestamps.

Change Failure Rate
Track incidents in monitoring or incident management systems.

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
Measure the time between failure detection and restoration of service.

Note: Measuring these manually is tedious and error-prone. Automation through engineering analytics tools ensures accuracy.

How to Improve DORA Metrics

Deployment Frequency

• Automate deployments with CI/CD.
• Break down large monolith releases into smaller, more frequent ones.

Lead Time for Changes

• Reduce bottlenecks in reviews.
• Automate testing and quality checks.

Change Failure Rate

• Adopt rigorous testing.
• Encourage blameless postmortems to prevent repeat issues.

MTTR

• Implement strong monitoring and alerting.
• Standardize incident response playbooks.

Good to know: Improvements in one metric often positively impact the others (e.g., reducing MTTR boosts confidence in more frequent deployments).

The Role of Analytics Platforms in DORA Metrics

Implementing and tracking DORA metrics consistently is challenging. That’s why modern organizations are automating it.

The Scrums.com SEOP integrates with GitHub, JIRA, and DevOps pipelines to:

• Automatically calculate all four DORA metrics.
• Provide real-time dashboards and historical trends.
• Benchmark engineering maturity against industry standards.

This helps leaders move beyond gut feel, enabling data-driven decisions to strengthen engineering culture.

Conclusion

DORA metrics are not just numbers, they’re a proven framework for achieving faster, more reliable software delivery. By measuring and improving deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR, teams can build healthier, high-performing engineering organizations.

Want to see where your team stands? Features like Scrums.com Analytics make it effortless to measure DORA metrics and use them as a catalyst for continuous improvement.