DORA Metrics
14 minutes reading time
In today’s dynamic environment - technology companies struggle to evaluate the performance of their software development teams. Among all the studies conducted to make engineering teams more agile and efficient, the DORA group's study defined the key metrics crucial for the software process's effectiveness. The question is how to measure these metrics.
In this article, we will explain the creation of a custom DORA dashboard for your organization used to measure the quality of your development and deployment processes. We will clarify the role of DORA dashboards in tech companies and the need to identify and manage the key progress metrics appropriately.
Understanding DORA Metrics
What Are DORA Metrics?
In the past 10 years, more than 30000 IT professionals worldwide have participated in the global DevOps acceleration survey. As a result in 2018, Google established a program called DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) group. They introduced the DORA Metrics – a concept that defines 4 key metrics for distinguishing high-performance from average development teams.
How Can You Measure DORA Metrics Effectively in Your Organization?
The most efficient way to measure and monitor DORA metrics is to establish your custom dashboard that will display the team’s performance. The dashboard will be integrated within your development / DevOps environment and track daily activities, such as failures, fixes, deployments, etc. Your dashboard will collect and present information from your process tools such as Jira, Slack, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Teams, etc.
Which Key Metrics Are Included in DORA Assessments?
DORA group defines four metrics (referred to as DORA metrics):
- Deployment Frequency (DF) – measures how often code is successfully deployed in a production environment. Engineering teams tend to deliver new features to clients as soon as possible, so this metric is useful to understand how frequently that happens.
- Lead Time for Changes (LTFC) – this metric indicates how long it takes for a change to appear in the production environment. It indicates the average time between the first commit made in the dev environment and the moment when that feature works successfully in the production environment.
- Failed Deployment Recovery Time (also known as time to restore service and mean time to recovery, or MTTR) – measures the time needed for the system to recover from a failed production deployment. To improve the TTRS, DevOps must constantly observe the production environment.
- Change Failure Rate (CFR) – measures the percent of deployments causing a production failure, and is calculated by dividing the number of failures by the total number of deployments.
Creating a Functional Dashboard
The DORA Metrics dashboard should be set up to streamline and improve your software development life cycle (SDLC):
- Easy dashboard setup: The dashboard should be set up easily and quickly, without coding. It will present detailed, intuitive analyses based on information gathered about your DevOps performance.
- Tools integration: The dashboard should connect with your existing Git (GitHub, GitLab) and PM tools (Jira Cloud, Azure DevOps), enabling a smooth transition and integration into your workflow, minimizing disruption.
- Software life cycle monitoring: The dashboard should enable you to track your software development process, from initial code commits to final deployment, ensuring that each stage is optimized for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
Why Is the DORA Metrics Dashboard Important for a Software Development Team?
The DORA metrics dashboard will provide team leaders with truthful insights, as they can analyze the metrics to assess team performance. The dashboard allows you to:
- measure performance quickly;
- compare yourself with industry standards or your peers;
- continuously improve your team thanks to regular monitoring; and
- improve customer satisfaction, because DORA metrics focus on fast and reliable deliveries.
By looking at CFR and TTRS, teams can ensure their code is robust and stable, while reducing failures. On the other hand, monitoring DF and LTFC ensures that the team is working well. Combined, DORA metrics provide crucial information on team speed and software quality.
Which Tool Can Help You Visualize DORA Metrics effectively?
Axify can help you visualize the different DORA metrics effectively. It can integrate and synchronize data from various platforms for accurate, real time reporting.
DORA Metrics Dashboard Views
Lead Time for Changes View
LTFC dashboard view will show the time it takes from the first commit to execute code in production successfully. How long it takes to go from commit to master, then to release and production – that’s how long it takes to make a change. Less is better. This dashboard view will assist you in making organizational, human and technical changes.
Change Failure Rate View
Change failure rate measures the percentage of deployments that cause a failure in production and need to be fixed or rollbacked after deployment. CFR dashboard view will display how many changes that we deployed to production resulted in a bug or outage. A high change failure rate indicates that your team hasn’t paid enough attention to testing, or that its deployment process is not thorough.
Deployment Frequency View
Deployment frequency measures how often your team successfully deploys to production. By improving the DF, you’ll be able to provide feedback and resolve issues, while increasing the perceived value to your customers. The DF view shows the number of cycles in the CI/CD (continuous integration/deployment) pipeline before deployment to production.
Failed Deployment Recovery Time View
The failed deployment recovery time dashboard view shows how long it takes to fix software after an incident in production. In other words, the TTRS view will show how quickly your team can identify and resolve issues that affect your software systems. It's an important metric to track since it helps you identify flaws in your software delivery pipeline and optimize it by improving efficiency.
Challenges in Building a DORA Metrics Dashboard
1. Gathering Data from Different Sources
Data gathering is a very demanding task to do manually, which can also lead to inaccuracies and misinterpretations. Customized metrics should be calculated and displayed by gathering data from issue tracking, ongoing pull requests, Jira tickets, service-level tasks (workflow), issues throughput per sprint, Git repository, Azure DevOps, etc.
2. Effective Visual Presentation
A simple, high-quality visual representation is easy to understand, but creating one can be complicated and overwhelming. That's why a platform like Axify is relevant.
Axify’s DORA metrics dashboard is easy to use and offers a concise summary of each team’s software delivery performance. The dashboard data is interesting at every level for the software development team. What’s more, it presents data without overwhelming users.
The features incorporated in the dashboard are standard DORA metrics, but the way they are presented makes all the difference. You can use Axify’s DORA dashboard to automate data collection from various sources, get a simplified overview of a complex process in one place and in real time, instantly identify areas for improvement and openly discuss them with your teams.
3. Data Integrity
The tools intended for DevOps are only as good as the quality of the data they produce. Providing data integrity and accuracy through every stage of the data life cycle is very important, but difficult to achieve. The volume of data is increasing rapidly, and data is stored in different formats, in databases in multiple locations, on premise and in the cloud. With an automated tool like Axify, data integrity and relevance are guaranteed.
How to Easily Build a DORA Metrics Dashboard
Manual calculations can provide useful insights, but an automated tool like Axify.io can prognostically model system behaviour and track DORA metrics effortlessly. Axify is a single platform to observe all the key performance indicators that will help you improve your development and delivery processes. It provides superior dashboards and constant tracking of DORA metrics in real time, simplifying the whole process and enabling teams to focus on improvement.
Step 1: Create your free account
Step 2: Connect your repositories from your source control management.
Step 3: Configure your deployments with your CD pipeline and incident tracking with your monitoring system or issue tracker.
Step 4: Create teams and assign contributors to your teams.
Step 5: Explore, assess and enjoy!
In Conclusion
DORA dashboards provide continuous, real time tracking of multiple software metrics, simplifying the whole process and enabling teams to concentrate on making improvements.
Axify.io, with its proven track record in functional dashboards, can improve the stability of your process, fostering a streamlined operation and a satisfied team, resulting in a win-win situation for all. Feel free to contact us for a quick demo of how we can improve your software development process.