What are the DORA metrics?

The DORA metrics are four measures, from Google's DevOps Research and Assessment programme, that are the industry standard for judging how well a team delivers software.

• Deployment Frequency — how many deployments happen across a defined period. Small, frequent deployments are better, as they are easier to roll back and have fewer inter-dependencies. Higher is usually better, provided Change Failure Rate stays low.
• Lead Time for Changes — the time from a developer marking an issue as fixed in code, to that code actually being deployed and used in production. With a short duration, the context of a change is not lost if something goes wrong, so recovery is usually quicker. The shorter, the better.
• Change Failure Rate — the ratio of failed deploys/changes to total deploys/changes. This indicates how ready and stable changes are at the point of execution. The lower, the better.
• Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), also known as Failed Deployment Recovery Time — the time it takes to recover a service to working order after a failed deployment or system fault. The shorter, the better.

The four DORA metrics are useful from a management point of view, but they do not tell you anything about an individual deployment and its health while it is happening — that needs its own set of metrics, tracked in real time.