DORA metrics

DORA metrics are a small set of measures of software delivery performance, from the DORA research program. They describe how quickly changes reach production and how often those changes cause trouble.

What it is

DORA's guide now lists five metrics in two groups.

Throughput:

• Change lead time: from commit to running in production.
• Deployment frequency: how often you deploy.
• Failed deployment recovery time: how long it takes to recover from a deployment that needs immediate intervention.

Instability:

• Change fail rate: the share of deployments that need immediate intervention, often a rollback or hotfix.
• Deployment rework rate: the share of deployments that are unplanned and caused by a production incident.

The original "four keys" are the first four.

Why it matters

Speed and stability are measured together, so a team can't look good by shipping fast and breaking things, or by shipping rarely. With AI agents writing more changes, these numbers show whether the extra output reaches users safely.

In AI CodeOps

The dashboard shows four metrics for the last 30 days, worked out from your deployment and incident records:

• Deployment frequency: succeeded deploys per day.
• Lead time: the median time from the session that started a change to its deploy finishing. The session start stands in for the commit.
• Change failure rate: failed and rolled-back deploys out of all finished ones. Canceled deploys don't count.
• Time to restore: the median time from an incident being detected to it being resolved.

Deployment rework rate isn't computed.