Anuradha Prasanna, Enterprise architect | Mitra Innovation
– Part of our Discover DevOps series
DevOps Research and Assessment or DORA is a research program that investigates the capabilities that drive software delivery performance and stability in organisations across the globe. One of the useful analytical tools DORA provides is the DORA Quadrant. This tool determines the DevOps maturity of an organisation.
The DORA Quadrant uses four key measurements:
1. Deployment Frequency
For the primary application or service that you work on, how often does your organisation deploy code to production or release it to end-users?
2. Lead Time for Changes
For the primary application or service that you work on, what is the lead time for changes i.e., how long does it take to go from code being committed to code successfully running in production?
3. Time to Restore Service
For the primary application or service that you work on, how long does it generally take to restore service when an incident that impacts users occurs i.e., an unplanned outage or service impairment?
4. Change Failure Rate
For the primary application or service that you work on, what percentage of changes to production or releases to users, result in a service impairment or outage, subsequently requiring remediation, e.g., a hotfix, rollback, fix forward or patch?
DevOps Performance
| by Deployment frequency and Lead time for changes
Application Stability
| by Time to restore service and Change failure rate
So, based on the deployment frequency and the lead time for changes, we can determine how effectively DevOps is performing, and by looking at the time to restore and the change failure rate, we can understand the stability of the application.
Using DORA you can also compare your application or organisation with their annual, global studies.
You can see here a summary of the study DORA has done in 2019:
Source: DORA Accelerate State of DevOps 2019 report
By comparing your application/team/organisation’s rating to these industry benchmarks, you can get a clear understanding of how you are performing.
If you have multiple applications to assess, you can measure these individually deriving an average for the final quadrant.
In summary, the key measurements above allow you to apply industry recognised metrics to your application development and deployment, assessing the quality of your application code and the maturity of your DevOps process.
This is a great tool for any organisation to assess current development and deployment processes and track performance against set internal targets and those of the industry.
