DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)

Created: January 05, 2025

DORA is a research program (by Google) that seeks to understand the capabilities that drive software delivery and operations performance. DORA helps teams apply those capabilities, leading to better organizational performance

DORA publishes an annual report that summarizes the key findings from their research.

Integral to the report is the concept of measuring four different metrics to assess the performance of a software delivery team. These are the metrics from the 2024 report:

Change lead time: the time it takes for a code commit or change to be successfully deployed to production.
Deployment frequency: how often application changes are deployed to production.
Change fail rate: the percentage of deployments that cause failures in production, requiring hotfixes or rollbacks.
Failed deployment recovery time: the time it takes to recover from a failed deployment.

Metrics have changed over the years due to criticism and feedback from the commmunity.

Benefits

DORA states that high-performing teams are more likely to achieve the following benefits:

Reducing burnout: Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged or excessive stress, often characterized by feelings of cynicism, detachment, and a lack of accomplishment.
Flow: Flow measures how much focus a person tends to achieve during development tasks.
Job satisfaction: Job satisfaction measures someone’s overall feeling about their job.
Organizational performance: This measures an organization’s performance in areas including profitability, market share, total customers, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, quality of products and services, and its ability to achieve goals.
Product performance: This measures the usability, functionality, value, availability, performance (for example, latency), and security of a product.
Productivity: Productivity measures the extent to which an individual feels effective and efficient in their work, creating value and achieving tasks.
Team performance: This measures a team’s ability to collaborate, innovate, work efficiently, rely on each other, and adapt.

Thoughts

DORA should never be used as a stick to beat teams with. It should be used as a tool to help teams improve.
DORA should be internal to the team and not used as a comparison tool between teams. Senior management should not use DORA to compare teams.
DORA is very opinionated and is only applicable to certain types of organizations.