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Optimal Lab

DevOps · interactive

DORA metrics

Years of research found four numbers that separate high-performing teams: two for speed, two for stability. The surprise is that they move together. Teams that ship more often also break less and recover faster.

  • Deployment frequencyHow often you ship to production1/weekHigh
  • Lead time for changesCommit to running in production5 daysHigh
  • Change failure rateDeploys that cause an incident or rollback15%High
  • Time to restoreFrom failure to recovery8 hHigh

Better: smaller batches, quicker feedback. Automation and smaller changes push further.

Team

Step 1 of 4

  1. 1

    Two speed metrics

    Deployment frequency and lead time: how fast value reaches users.

    Measured from your CI/CD and git history.

  2. 2

    Two stability metrics

    Change failure rate and time to restore: how often you break things, and how fast you fix them.

    From incidents and rollbacks.

  3. 3

    Small batches win both

    Smaller, more frequent changes are easier to review, test, deploy and roll back.

    Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, Kim).

  4. 4

    Use them to improve, not to rank

    Track trends within a team. Turned into targets for comparing people, they get gamed.

    Pair with developer experience surveys.

In production

Tools and technologies

DORA metrics are built into many engineering dashboards.

Not tied to one language — use these names when you search docs or design a system.