The four DORA metrics

  • Deployment Frequency — how often do you ship to production? Elite: multiple times per day. High: weekly. Medium: monthly. Low: less than monthly.
  • Lead Time for Changes — time from code commit to production. Elite: < 1 hour. High: < 1 day.
  • Change Failure Rate — percentage of deployments that cause production issues. Elite: 0–5%.
  • Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) — how long to recover from an incident. Elite: < 1 hour.

Why they matter

Teams with high deployment frequency and low MTTR are both faster and more stable. The DORA research (State of DevOps) shows these are not in tension — they improve together.

Improving the metrics

  • Deployment Frequency: reduce PR size, automate testing, reduce approval gates.
  • Lead Time: measure the queue time at each stage — that is where the time is.
  • Change Failure Rate: invest in automated testing and staged rollouts.
  • MTTR: invest in observability, runbooks, and on-call practices.