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Measuring Developer Productivity: DORA Metrics

By Mohd Baquir Qureshi
DORA Metrics Dashboard

Most engineering managers measure the wrong things. Lines of Code (LOC) incentivizes bloated codebases. Story points are highly subjective. To truly measure team performance, we need DORA metrics.

The Four Key Metrics

1. Deployment Frequency: How often code is shipped to production.

2. Lead Time for Changes: The time from committing code to it running in production.

3. Change Failure Rate: The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production.

4. Time to Restore Service: How quickly you recover from a failure.

Conclusion

By focusing on these four metrics, you encourage small, frequent, and reliable deployments. For more on optimizing these processes, see Code Review Culture.