The Only Four CI/CD Metrics That Actually Matter (DORA)

Vanity dashboards do not tell you if your delivery is healthy. The four DORA metrics do, and they are the ones we baseline at the start of every DevOps engagement.

The four metrics

• Deployment frequency — how often you ship to production
• Lead time for changes — commit to production duration
• Change-failure rate — % of deploys causing a failure
• Mean time to restore (MTTR) — how fast you recover

How to improve them

Frequency and lead time improve with automation, trunk-based development and smaller batches. Change-failure rate drops with automated testing and progressive delivery. MTTR improves with observability, fast rollback and a blameless incident process. Improve them together — optimising one in isolation usually degrades another.