Why software developers prefer DORA metrics

1. They’re backed by research, which shows a statistically significant correlation between positive DORA metrics and positive organizational performance. DORA metrics are not a gut feeling.
2. DORA metrics are a crystallization of the DevOps practices we’ve been applying for many years but in a succinct way. The DORA metrics show how well your team is doing at continuous improvement and learning. For example, we’ve understood through practice that reducing batch size was effective because it allowed us to get work done quickly. DORA put those things into categories of metrics—deploy frequency, change lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery— and showed how they relate to each other. From a practitioner’s perspective, DORA metrics have named the things we’ve always done.
3. DORA metrics keep it simple. Organizations often get bogged down when deciding what to measure in terms of engineering. DORA allows teams to start with metrics that are well defined with industry benchmarks and have the wisdom of the crowd behind them.
4. DORA metrics are team metrics and therefore don’t create the same fears and worries that individual metrics bring up for developers. DORA metrics can still be weaponized, but they recognize that software development is a team sport. If you read about DORA and the State of DevOps reports, they’re all about teams.
5. DORA metrics distill complex activities into simple, hard measures. They can take data from source control, source review systems, issue trackers, incident management providers, and metrics tools and turn them into four key measures. This makes it possible to compare DORA metrics from one team to the next, even though not all teams are equal. The DORA research allows teams to bucket themselves into low, medium, and high performance categories based on how they perform across the four key metrics mentioned above. This allows teams to draw wide conclusions about how they perform compared to other teams.
6. DORA metrics cover a broad swath, including the developer process and how well that process is delivering to customers. DORA metrics look at the process from the time a developer starts coding to the time the team delivers something to production. They recognize that no one wants to take the “move fast and break stuff” approach. DORA metrics encourage the healthier approach of “move fast, responsibly.”