# How Organisations are using DORA Metrics


When an organisation is creating something impactful, The first concern which arises in the management's minds is what difficulties we will face while developing this product. Which is the easy part. After developing the software, a mountain of hardships are faced, such as delays in updates or irregular updates, improvement in performance in the engineering department,

Tracking such data was kind of impossible. Some of the field's biggest names, including Martin Fowler and Joel Spolsky, had said it couldn't be done.

For the assurance of the progress of the development process, we need to track the progress by certain metrics.

Here, after the research of long 6 years **DevOps Research and assessment**(DORA)matrics was developed.

## What is dora matric and how dora matrice is helping in solving all these problems faced by development teams.

After 6 years of research, the DORA team has identified these four matrics to identify the performance of a development team.

1. Deployment Frequency: How often organisation releases to production.
2. Lead time for changes: The amount of time it takes to get into production.
3. Change failure rate: The percentage of deployments causing failure in production.
4. Time to restore Service: How long it takes an organisation to recover from a failure in production.


On the basis of these matrics, DORA evaluates the organisation in these categories: Elite, High, Medium, and Low performance teams; and as a result, they conclude that elite performing teams are twice as productive and it is more likely that the organisation will meet the projected goal.

## How using DORA Metrics fixes these problems faced by developerment teams.

To observe how these metrics are fixing problems faced by development teams, we need to analyse organisations that are using these metrics in their deployment process.

### Akvo

Let's see how [Akvo](https://akvo.org)'s deployment process is using DORA metrices.

1. Any commit to main is tested for deployment.
2. After some manual Quality analysis the test environment is promoted to production.
3. As after promotion no binaries are created so no need for build or test, only deployment.

So this is the process of deployment used in Akvo.

### How they are using all the four metrices?

1. Deployment frequency: They are using git tags with pattern`promote-$datetime`
2. Delivery lead time: They sort the commits in topological order, and use of CI build time as one their application's pipeline take a significant amount of time to run which effects the MTTR, thats why including CI pipeline time is important .
3. Change fail rate: They rely on a simple yes/no question. `Does this deployment contain a hotfix for a previous deployment? [Y/n]`
4. Mean time to restore service: They record incidents in [Atlassian's StatusPage](https://https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage) from where they extract the exact timing and information needed.

### Conclusion

Being a data-driven organization, not only these 4 metrics can give a bird's eye view of any team deployment and development lifecycle. Now Dora Matrics is co-operating with DevLake, which is already providing great insights about the development process, and things are running smoothly. DevLake analyses more than 30 metrics and provides extremely useful data on the Grafana Dashboard. This collaboration with DORA will provide more insightful data, which will definitely help in speeding up the development and deployment process.

### References

https://dev.to/danlebrero/implementing-dora-key-software-delivery-metrics-2o1d

https://dev.to/ghostinthewire5/how-we-used-dora-metrics-to-boost-deployments-increase-automation-and-more-dd9