According the the 2024 DevOps Report, they found that elite performing teams achieved 182x more deployments per year. One approach to achieving this is through the use of DORA metrics tools.
In this article, we'll explore what these metrics are, which tools are best suited for monitoring them, and how to take action based on the insights!
Sections:
1. What are DORA Metrics?
When Google's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team first introduced their metrics framework, they identified four key metrics that strongly indicate software delivery performance.
Backed by extensive research, these metrics have been shown to strongly correlate with the success of high-performing technology teams and correlate with high-performing technology organizations.
What are the 'DORA Metrics'?
Originally the DORA team identified four metrics and over time, this framework has evolved to include updates and a fifth metric. The metrics are as follows:
- Change Lead Time: The time from code commit to successful production deployment, indicating how quickly teams can deliver changes.
- Deployment Frequency: How often organizations deploy code to production or release updates to end users.
- Failed Deployment Recovery Time (Previously known as Mean Time to Recovery): The average time needed to restore service when a software change causes a production outage or failure.
- Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that result in service degradation or require remediation, such as hotfixes, rollbacks, or patches.
- Reliability: Added in 2021, this fifth metric evaluates operational performance through measures like availability, latency, performance, and scalability. Since it's relatively new and lacks quantifiable performance benchmarks, it often receives less focus than the original four metrics.
DORA metrics concentrate on performance aspects that correlate with both customer value and company financial performance. By tracking these key metrics, teams can identify areas needing improvement and measure themselves against industry standards.
2. Why do you need a DORA Metrics Tool?
Engineering teams do their best work when they can focus on building great products, not wrestling with tracking metrics. While DORA metrics are valuable indicators of software delivery performance, the real goal is to support your teams to consistently deliver value. Having a DORA metrics tool can support teams to focus on building great products rather than spending time on data collection.
Here are some challenges teams face when tracking data for DORA metrics:
- Data Fragmentation Across Systems: Organizations typically need to pull data from multiple sources to produce accurate measures (e.g. code is version controlled in Github, deployments are in CircleCI and incident management happens on PagerDuty). This fragmentation makes it difficult to firstly, collect data and secondly, get a complete picture of the metrics.
- Poor Data Visibility: Raw data alone isn't enough to drive improvements. Without proper visualization tools, teams struggle to identify patterns, spot bottlenecks, and understand the real issues affecting their performance.
- Friction in data definitions: Getting teams aligned on what is considered a “deployment” or “failure” as an example can take significant effort. In a world where the same metric can potentially mean different things to different people, a software tool serving as the source of truth accelerates conversation and progress.
A dedicated DORA metrics tool helps overcome these challenges by automating data collection across multiple systems, offering contextual insights across all metrics.
However, as we’ll go through later in the article — it’s not about choose the perfect tool but more about taking action on the insights!
3. Types of DORA Metric Tools
When selecting tools to measure DORA metrics and developer productivity, organizations typically consider three main categories:
- Open-Source Solutions
- Platform-Native Analytics
- Purpose-Built Engineering Insights Platforms
Let's dive into each category to understand their benefits and considerations.
Open-Source Solutions
Open-source tools like Google's Four Keys Project provide a flexible and cost-effective way to measure developer productivity. These solutions are ideal for organizations with the technical expertise to customize and maintain their own systems.
| Key benefits |
Considerations |
• Complete flexibility: Customize metrics and integrations to precisely fit your organization's needs.
• Cost-effective: No licensing fees, reducing direct costs beyond initial implementation.
• Community support: Leverage community-driven improvements, updates, and support resources.
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• Technical expertise required: Implementation and maintenance demand skilled personnel with experience in these tools.
• Infrastructure investment: Requires investment in infrastructure and ongoing system monitoring.
• Customization effort: May need significant customization to address specific use cases and integrate with existing workflows.
|
Platform-Native Analytics
Many development platforms offer built-in analytics capabilities. Tools embedded within platforms like GitLab integrate directly into your development workflow, providing immediate insights without additional setup (if you already use the tool).
| Key benefits |
Considerations |
• Instant setup: Zero setup time with automatic data collection from your existing projects.
• Seamless integration: Native integration ensures smooth operation within your development environment.
• Regular updates: Benefit from ongoing improvements as part of the platform's standard updates.
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• Ecosystem limitations: Analytics are confined to the platform's ecosystem, potentially limiting broader visibility.
• Limited customization: Less flexibility to tailor metrics to your organization's unique requirements.
• Coverage gaps: May not encompass all aspects of developer productivity, such as cross-platform activities or external tool integrations.
|
Purpose-Built Engineering Insights Platforms
Dedicated developer productivity platforms like Multitudes offer comprehensive solutions that combine technical metrics with human factors, such as team collaboration and code quality.
| Key benefits |
Considerations |
• Holistic insights: Provide a combined view of technical performance and human-centric metrics.
• Pre-Built integrations: Easily connect with common development tools like Jira, Slack, and others.
• Dedicated support: Access to ongoing customer support and regular feature enhancements tailored to industry needs.
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• Additional Investment: Involves licensing costs and potential training for team members to drive holistic understanding of delivery.
• Workflow alignment: Requires evaluation to ensure compatibility with existing processes and tools.
• Feature fit: Important to assess whether the platform's features align with your specific measurement goals and KPIs.
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How to Choose the Right DORA Metrics Tool?
Selecting the appropriate DORA metrics tool is important for successfully implementing and benefiting from these metrics. The tool should integrate with your existing DevOps toolchain, including version control systems, CI/CD pipelines, and incident management platforms. Ensure the tool can accurately collect and process data from various sources without manual intervention.
Look for tools that offer clear, actionable insights through their dashboards and reporting features. The tool should be scalable, able to handle increased data volumes as your organization grows, and adhere to your security requirements and relevant industry regulations.
If you’re looking for some help choosing, you can book a free demo with Multitudes and chat with our team.
4. What are the benefits of Tracking DORA Metrics?
Implementing DORA metrics tools and consistently tracking these metrics can bring numerous benefits to a team, particularly in enhancing their ability to deliver software quickly and reliably. This improved delivery performance can lead to a faster time-to-market for new features and updates.
Here's how different benefits contribute to this improved performance:
- Data-informed decision making: DORA metrics provide concrete data that can inform strategic decisions about process improvements, tooling investments, and resource allocation. This approach helps eliminate guesswork and allows for more targeted improvements.
- Enhanced team collaboration and benchmarking: These metrics encourage cross-functional collaboration between development, operations, and other teams. Additionally, teams can benchmark their performance against industry standards, providing valuable context for setting realistic improvement goals.
- Improved risk management: By tracking metrics like Change Failure Rate and increasing Deployment Frequency, teams can ship smaller batches of work more often. This reduces deployment risks while enabling more frequent feedback and iteration.
It's important to note that while these benefits are significant, they don't typically improve overnight.
The time to see improvements can vary widely depending on the organization and the specific changes implemented. Consistency in tracking and acting on DORA metrics is key to realizing their full potential.
5. Moving from Metrics to Action
While DORA metrics provide valuable insights into DevOps performance, tracking these metrics alone isn't enough to drive meaningful improvement. The real value comes from taking action on these insights and implementing changes that lead to better performance.
Effective DevOps improvement requires a combination of measurement and action:
- Converting metrics into actionable workflow improvements
- Using benchmarks to identify specific areas needing attention
- Implementing tools that guide teams toward better practices
The key to success lies in how organizations implement and act on these metrics. Teams need tools that not only track metrics but also provide guidance on how to improve them.
Multitudes helps teams improve by not only tracking key metrics, but also by recommending actions that teams can take to improve their metrics. .
Ready to unlock happier, higher-performing teams that ship 25% faster?
