Measuring Engineering Productivity Correctly
Many organisations measure lines of code written or tickets closed. These metrics are misleading. The DORA Research Program (from Google) identified four metrics that reliably distinguish elite engineering teams from low performers.
The Four DORA Metrics
- Deployment Frequency: How often does your team deploy to production? Elite teams deploy on-demand, multiple times per day.
- Lead Time for Changes: The time from a committed code change to it running in production. Elite: under one hour.
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): How quickly can your team recover from a production incident? Elite: under one hour.
- Change Failure Rate: What percentage of deployments cause production incidents? Elite teams maintain under 5%.
Implementing a DORA Dashboard
Instrument your CI/CD pipeline to emit deployment events. Feed them into a metrics platform like Grafana or DataDog to visualise DORA metrics in real-time and set improvement targets for each quarter.