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According to the 2024 DORA Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite teams deploying code 182 times more frequently than their low-performing counterparts. By focusing on DevOps metrics, teams can identify areas for improvement and perform similar to that of the elite performers. In this article we highlight 10 DevOps metrics that teams can use to improve their outcomes.
Sections:
DevOps metrics are quantitative measurements that help organizations assess the efficiency, quality, and performance of their software development and delivery processes. By tracking these key performance indicators (KPIs), teams can identify areas for improvement, streamline workflows, and ultimately deliver value to customers faster and more reliably.
The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google Cloud has extensively studied what makes teams successful. Through research spanning over 36,000 professionals, they've identified four key metrics that consistently predict high performance, which we’ve marked below. But team success extends beyond these core metrics.
Measures how often code is deployed to production or deliver updates to users.
A higher deployment frequency indicates a rapid delivery of features and updates.
According to the latest DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) report, elite performers in Deployment Frequency deploy on-demand, multiple times per day.
Represents the time taken from committing code to having it successfully running in production.
Shorter lead times suggest that code is moving quickly through the development pipeline, allowing for faster feedback and iteration.
Elite performers/teams achieve a lead time of less than one day. (According to the 2024 DORA Report)
The average time needed to restore service after a software change causes a production outage or failure. Previously, Mean Time to Recovery also encompassed uncontrollable failure events, such as a widespread power outage disrupting service.
A lower recovery time means teams can quickly diagnose and fix issues, reducing downtime and minimizing impact on users.
According to 2024 DORA report, elite performers in Mean Time to Recovery achieve a recovery time of less than one hour
The percentage of changes that result in degraded service or require immediate remediation, such as a hotfix or rollback. A lower change failure rate reflects more stable releases and higher quality code.
According to the 2024 DevOps Report, elite teams achieve a change failure rate between 0–5%. This serves as a benchmark for high-performing DevOps organizations.
Refers to the number of lines of code changed or the number of files changed in a pull request.
Smaller PRs are generally easier to review and test, leading to quicker merges and reducing the risk of introducing errors.
There are no strict limits, but a Cisco study suggests reviewing no more than 400 lines of code at once; beyond this point, the brain’s ability to detect defects starts to decline.
Measures the median number of PRs merged per team, over time.
Higher merge frequency helps prevent merge conflicts and keeps the codebase integrated, facilitating continuous delivery.
Google recommends that elite teams deploy multiple times daily. Assuming an average of one deployment is linked to a PR merge. One merge per day per team translates to about five deployments each week during a standard 5-day workweek.
Represents the amount of uninterrupted time that developers spend working on their tasks.
Increased focus time can lead to higher productivity and better quality work by reducing context switching.
At Multitudes, we recommend averaging 2+ hours of Focus Time each day. This recommendation aligns with Harvard Business Review research, which suggests a minimum of 10 hours of focus time per week (or 2 hours per day).
This shows how much of each type of work the team completed. Different types of work could include support tasks, fixing bugs, or developing new features. Understanding the distribution of work types helps teams balance their efforts and allocate resources effectively.
What’s considered ‘good’ usually depends on your team and product priorities. Many teams value consistency from week to week, as it aids in planning and maintaining momentum.
Tracks the amount of work performed outside regular working hours. Monitoring this metric helps identify potential overwork or burnout risks, promoting a healthier work-life balance.
On average, this metric should be close to zero, with team members minimizing work outside regular hours as much as possible. If it starts to trend above zero, it’s essential to ensure it doesn’t become a sustained pattern, preventing team members from regularly working extended hours. As modern teams adapt flexible working patters, it is important to consider peoples typical working hours when calculating 'out-of-hours work'. At Multitudes we support folk to individually set their working hours.
This shows the absolute difference between the most and least frequent commenters on the team. A smaller participation gap indicates more balanced involvement and better knowledge sharing within the team.
Smaller participation gaps indicate a more balanced distribution of contributions, reflecting a team where responsibilities are shared more equally.
Read more about what we measure and why here.
While automation remains fundamental to DevOps success, the 2024 DORA report reveals some unexpected findings about AI adoption. Despite widespread enthusiasm, teams implementing AI tools have seen a decrease in software delivery performance. The reason? AI tends to generate larger batches of code changes, which historically correlate with higher deployment risks.
However, it's not all cautionary news. Teams using AI have shown improved operational stability, suggesting that AI can be valuable when implemented strategically. The key is to focus on automating the right things:
The 2024 DORA research reinforces that team culture significantly impacts DevOps success. Transformational leadership emerges as a key driver of high performance – leaders who provide clear direction while supporting their teams see remarkable results across multiple dimensions:
The most successful teams combine strong technical practices with intentional culture-building. This means:
To effectively track, analyze and improve DevOps metrics, teams can use Multitudes, an engineering insights platform built for sustainable delivery. Multitudes seamlessly integrates with your existing tools like GitHub, Jira, Google Calendar and PagerDuty to provide actionable insights into your team's delivery performance, operational health, and collaboration patterns.
With Multitudes, you can:
By leveraging Multitudes, teams can spend less time manually gathering metrics and more time acting on insights to improve their DevOps performance.
Our clients ship 25% faster without sacrificing code quality.
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