DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) is a research program that has identified key metrics for measuring software delivery and operational performance since its research began in 2014. These metrics provide an evidence-based framework for understanding how effectively teams deliver software, combining both throughput and stability dimensions to give organizations actionable insights into their DevOps maturity. One critical insight from DORA's research: speed and stability are not tradeoffs—elite teams excel at both, delivering frequently while maintaining high reliability, challenging the traditional assumption that moving faster sacrifices quality.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 21 focused tables and 121 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Core DORA Metrics
| Metric | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
On-demand (multiple deploys/day) | • How often code is deployed to production • throughput metric measuring team velocity and continuous delivery maturity. | |
Commit at 9am → Production at 11am = 2 hours | • Time from code commit to running in production • measures end-to-end delivery speed including coding, review, testing, and deployment. | |
5 deployments, 1 requires hotfix = 20% | • Percentage of production deployments causing failure requiring remediation (rollback, hotfix, or incident) • stability metric reflecting deployment quality. |