DORA Metrics

DORA metrics are four measurements from the DevOps Research and Assessment program that quantify software delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. The first two track speed — how often you ship and how long a change takes from commit to production. The last two track stability — how often deploys break things and how fast you recover. Together they resist the myth that speed and stability trade off; elite teams score well on both. For founders, DORA gives a vendor-neutral way to see whether your engineering process is actually improving, rather than relying on gut feel or lines of code. Practical note: you don't need a fancy platform to start — deployment frequency and lead time can come straight from your Git and CI history. Watch trends, not absolute numbers, and treat a rising change failure rate as an early warning that you're accumulating risk faster than you're paying it down.