DORA Metrics
Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore. Four numbers about how changes have historically flowed through this organization — a sensor of delivery pattern, answering “does our recent past look like teams that ship safely?”
Sensor properties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Oracle strength | Medium — the metrics proxy safety; they are not safety |
| Independence | High — derived from deployment and incident records, not self-report |
| Scope | Organization |
| Feedback latency | Days |
| Actionability | Guiding — tells you which stage of the pipeline to distrust |
| Type | Retrospective |
What it cannot detect
The cause of a bad number. DORA metrics locate the problem in time and stage; understanding it requires decision provenance and incident correlation. And like all metrics that become targets, they invite gaming — deployment frequency can be raised by shipping trivia.