How to Measure DORA Metrics Accurately

4 min readMay 18, 2022

DORA metrics are quite popular in the industry. However, working with them is extremely difficult. Let’s take a look at how your company can calculate and track DORA Metrics to gain complete visibility into complex delivery cycles.

Why are DORA Metrics so popular and important to track for the industry?

As software engineering organizations scale, fundamental software development and delivery processes become more and more complex. The number of tools used in the software delivery life cycle (SDLC) increases as processes become more sophisticated. Different teams within the company set up and run various delivery pipelines. During this process, visibility into the software development and delivery cycles is significantly reduced.

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) sought to find a solution to this complexity and invisibility problem:

How do you identify your organization’s elite performers?
What should low-performing teams focus on?

Once you begin to define and measure the metrics of the software delivery process, you will be able to improve them. Based on significant scientific research, DORA metrics empower engineering teams and leaders to improve their software development and delivery processes.

The DORA study’s approach attracted the interest of all engineering teams, from large-scale enterprises to small teams. Many engineering teams have tried to measure their DORA metrics by developing in-house tools since the beginning of the study. Because they could not adjust quickly enough to the changing and diversifying tools and methodologies within the company, in-house tools developed for specific processes have usually gone into junk. Many companies trying to measure DORA metrics with a ready-to-use product, on the other hand, struggled to locate a product that could fit their delivery pipeline and easily track accurate DORA metrics.

DORA metrics are quite popular in the industry. However, working with them is extremely difficult. Let’s talk about what are DORA Metrics basically and how you can track them accurately.

What are DORA Metrics basically?

DORA Metrics (a.k.a. Accelerate Metrics & Four Key Metrics)

Lead Time For Changes: The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production.
Deployment Frequency: How often an organization successfully releases to production. High-performing software teams release often and in small batches.
Change Failure Rate: The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.
Time to Restore Service: How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production.

State of DevOps 2021 — https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/state-of-devops-2021.pdf

Tracking DORA Metrics

Oobeya Deployment Analytics is an easy-to-use tool delivers accurate DORA metric results for all software development and DevOps teams. It analyzes the entire software development and delivery pipeline and calculates DORA metrics by connecting to various tools within the organization. You can connect both Source Control, CI/CD, APM, Incident Management, and Issue Tracking tools to calculate and track accurate DORA metrics with Oobeya Deployment Analytics.

No matter how you built your delivery cycle. It is easy to set up. For example, you can effortlessly calculate:

DORA Metrics for GitLab x GitLab CI
DORA Metrics for GitHub x Jenkins
DORA Metrics for GitHub x GitHub Actions
DORA Metrics for GitHub x AzureDevOps Releases
DORA Metrics for GitLab x Jenkins
DORA Metrics for Azure Repos x AzureDevOps Releases
DORA Metrics for Azure Repos x Jenkins
DORA Metrics for Bitbucket Server/Cloud x Jenkins

Watch and see how it is effortless measuring DORA Metrics in Oobeya:

Oobeya Free Edition: https://oobeya.io/dora-metrics/

Oobeya analyzes all commits, pull requests, and deployment pipelines and generates detailed historical reports of DORA metrics. Oobeya Deployment Analytics (DORA) Report includes the following features and more:

Lead Time For Changes (average time & breakdown & DORA badge)
Deployment Frequency (average & chart & DORA badge)
Change Failure Rate (average & DORA badge)
Time to Restore Service / Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) (average time & DORA badge)
List of deployments during the selected period (breakdown, lead time, contributors…)
Deploy size for each deployment (small, medium, large, gigantic)

Oobeya Deployment Analytics Report — DORA Metrics

“Lead Time For Changes” breakdown includes four significant steps such as coding time, code review time, waiting for deploy time, and deployment time. Visualizing these steps helps you pinpoint bottlenecks in your software development and delivery cycle. 👇