Software Delivery Performance Metrics
Research from DORA (DevOps Research & Assessment) has validated four metrics that measure software delivery performance. According to the study, companies that exhibit exceptional organizational performance excel in these metrics:
- Deployment Frequency: How often does your team and your organization release code to end users?
- Lead Time for Changes: How long does it take to go from code committed to code successfully running into production?
- Time to Restore Service: How long does it take to restore service when an incident or a defect that impacts users occurs?
- Change Failure Rate: What percentage of releases to production result in degraded service and subsequently require remediation?
You can explore the results in the State of DevOps Reports. To give you a bit of data, the following table summarizes how teams are doing in those four metrics (from the 2021 report).
| Metric | Elite | High | Medium | Low |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment frequency | On-demand (multiple deploys per day) | Between once per week and once per month | Between once per month and once every 6 months | Fewer than once per six months |
| Lead time for changes | Less than one hour | Between one day and one week | Between one month and six months | More than six months |
| Time to restore service | Less than one hour | Less than one day | Between one day and one week | More than six months |
| Change failure rate | 0%-15% | 16%-30% | 16%-30% | 16%-30% |
Notice that deployment frequency and lead time for changes play for Throughput, while time to restore service and change failure rate account for Stability. The research also reports a fifth metric, Reliability, as of operational performance.