DORA — Software Delivery Research Metrics
What is DORA?
DORA (DEVOPS RESEARCH & ASSESSMENT) is an academic research program that is made from over 32,000 professionals world wide. It shows metrics about how companies are delivering software to their end user (and even cutural aspects related to it).
Why should we use DORA or similar researches?
DORA is probably one of the best places to benchmark what your team/company are doing compared to other companies in a global research scale. You can even see what are the improvements you should be focusing and how to work on them.
How to use it?
First things first, I think it is very productive to just take an overall look on a graph google designed that shows how each theme relates to each other. For example, how continuous delivery results in less deployment pain and less rework.
After that, do their quick check formulary. This will show how well you are and what you should be focusing on.
The formulary has 5 simple questions about delivery processes and metrics related to delivering software to the end users.
More specifically:
- Lead time: time to deliver a commit to production
- Deploy frequency
- Time to restore: Time taken to restore a service that has gone down
- Change fail percentage: Amount of bugs generated for each feature deployed to production
- Industry: The industry your organization is
After that, DORA’s site will show you how your company is compared to other ones from the same industry (or if you want from other industries too), and a suggestion about what you could be working on.
Deciding what to focus
I answered the quick test as if the company was having some kind of trouble delivering to end users quickly (less than one month to deliver a code change).
The result of a hypothetical company I did was this:
The best thing besides what I already wrote in this article is that google has a lot of content related to what they suggest you to work on.
You could also see what they are suggesting for you to focus on and go back to the home page of DORA and complement your understading with the macro view the graph of how topics of actions and benefits relates with what you are going to focus.
Final comments
DORA is an awesome tool and resource I will be using for a long time. It has been doing these types of researches since 2014.
I felt like I needed to share this because I didn’t see many people talking about it through my career. So there goes my contribution to spreading this wonderful resource.
