4 posts tagged with "glossary"

Elite engineering teams deploy 973 times more often than low performers, and break production less often. That's the DORA 2023 State of DevOps finding that broke a decade of "move fast and break things" assumptions: speed and stability are correlated, not traded.

Deployment Frequency is the simplest of the four DORA metrics on the surface, and the most misread. A team can deploy ten times a day to staging, never ship to prod, and still call themselves "elite". This glossary fixes that: formula, benchmarks, what counts as a deploy, and the failure modes that make the number lie.

DORA metrics are the four numbers that predict how well a software team ships code. Not opinions, not surveys — four hard signals: how often you deploy, how long changes take to reach production, how often deploys break things, and how fast you recover. The 2023 DORA report by Google Cloud, built on 10 years of research and 36,000+ respondents, is the largest dataset ever assembled on software delivery — and it keeps finding the same pattern.

This glossary explains each metric in plain English, with formulas and the benchmarks that separate elite teams from low performers. Read it once, keep it as a reference.

Roughly 80% of the engineering teams I've reviewed in the last year report a "Lead Time" number that DORA wouldn't recognize. They measure ticket-creation-to-release. DORA measures something narrower and harder to game: first commit to production. The gap between those two definitions is often 5–10 days, and it's the difference between an honest delivery metric and a dashboard that flatters the wrong people.

This guide pins down the strict DORA definition, gives you the formula, separates Lead Time from Cycle Time (they're not synonyms), and shows the 2026 elite/high/medium/low bands you can benchmark against.

Two production outages, same root cause: a bad config push that crashed a payments service. Team A spent 2 hours 14 minutes restoring service. Team B was back in 6 minutes. Team B's MTTR wasn't lower because they had smarter engineers. They had a one-command rollback rehearsed monthly, a runbook pinned in the on-call channel, and write access to production already granted to the responder. That 134-minute gap is what MTTR measures, and what separates the DORA 2023 State of DevOps Report elite cluster from everyone else.