My understanding of DORA was about the four key metrics (Deployment frequency, Lead time for changes, Time to restore service, and Change failure rate). I didn’t understand why it should be relevant to my work. Why should these metrics be my Northstar? They don’t give me much value.
I got a better idea with the nice podcast Dave Farley with DORA research co-creator Nicole Forsgren. The initial motivation was to link technical capital to company financial capital. This is more about building a bridge between engineers, non-technical founders, and managers using arguments and reasoning.
I came to an understanding. If we have lower-than-high metrics, we should fix them. Around 80% of DORA respondents from 2022 answered that they did not have all high metrics. This is the main target audience because DORA also includes techniques to achieve better results.
High metrics values sound this way:
- Deployment frequency is anytime, or multiple deployments are made per day
- Less than one day time to restore service
- Lead time for changes is between one day and one week.
- 0%-15% for change failure rate for releases.
These high metrics might be very loose for some businesses, and business requirements may become stricter. Or we are already stable in High with all key metrics; let’s keep the metrics, not lower them. However, for further development, we need to improve on other things related to product goals. This might involve decreasing costs and revenue losses, better scaling, or .9995 uptime, or anything else. This way, our goal changes further, but DORA-related things are on the passed basis of this.
Short Youtube preview and Podcast links in video description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-DzU5py_I
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I’m Alex, tech lead in Prestatech with experience from startups to middle-sized and big-tech companies. Loves to make effective and friendly team processes.
You can freely drop a message to [email protected] or linkedin.com/in/aptakhin to greet and ask questions about any topic.