DORA Metrics Self-Assessment for Teams

Estimate your five DORA delivery metrics as a team, then act on the weakest.

Try this health check live

What are the DORA metrics?

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment), the research program now part of Google Cloud, identified a small set of software delivery metrics that predict how well teams perform. Three measure throughput: how often you deploy, how long a change takes to reach production, and how quickly you recover from a failed deployment. Two measure instability: how often deployments fail, and how many deployments are unplanned fixes. Most teams don't have these numbers on a dashboard. This self-assessment is a team version of DORA's one-person Quick Check: everyone picks the range that matches their experience of the last three months. The answer ranges are TeamRetro's, not DORA's official benchmarks. Where people pick different ranges, that gap is the first thing to talk about. Take the weakest metric into your retrospective and agree on one change to improve it.

Dimensions

Throughput

How quickly and how often changes reach production.

  • Deployment Frequency

    How often does our team deploy to production?

    1. Fewer than once every six months
    2. Between once a month and once every six months
    3. Between once a week and once a month
    4. Between once a day and once a week
    5. On demand (several times a day)

  • Change Lead Time

    How long does it take a committed change to reach production?

    1. More than six months
    2. One to six months
    3. One week to one month
    4. One day to one week
    5. Less than one day

  • Failed Deployment Recovery Time

    When a deployment fails and needs immediate attention, how long does it take us to recover?

    1. More than one month
    2. One week to one month
    3. One day to one week
    4. Less than one day
    5. Less than one hour

Instability

How often deployments go wrong and need fixing.

  • Change Fail Rate

    What share of our deployments need immediate intervention, such as a rollback or hotfix?

    1. More than 45%
    2. 30% to 45%
    3. 15% to 30%
    4. 5% to 15%
    5. Less than 5%

  • Deployment Rework Rate

    What share of our deployments are unplanned, made to fix a problem in production?

    1. More than 45%
    2. 30% to 45%
    3. 15% to 30%
    4. 5% to 15%
    5. Less than 5%

When to use this health check

  • When you want DORA numbers but haven't set up tooling to measure them.
  • Quarterly, to track delivery alongside the SPACE Framework Health Check.
  • Before investing in delivery tooling, to agree which metric is the real bottleneck.

Tips & tricks

  • Agree the reference period before people rate. The last three months works for most teams.
  • Where ratings spread across several ranges, people see delivery differently. Talk about that before the average.
  • Use N/A for 'I don't know'. Lots of N/A answers usually means the metric is worth measuring properly.
  • DORA metrics describe a team's delivery system, not individual performance. Compare teams with care.
  • Pick the weakest metric, agree on one change in your retrospective, and re-run the check next quarter.
  • To look at the practices behind the numbers, follow up with the DevOps Maturity Assessment.

Frequently asked questions

What are the DORA metrics?
Five software delivery metrics from the DORA research program. Deployment frequency, change lead time and failed deployment recovery time measure throughput. Change fail rate and deployment rework rate measure instability. The original 'four key metrics' didn't include rework rate, which DORA added more recently.
What does DORA stand for?
DevOps Research and Assessment. It's the research program behind the State of DevOps reports, and it has been part of Google Cloud since 2018.
How do you measure DORA metrics without a tool?
Ask the people doing the work. In this check, each person picks the range that best matches the last three months. It's less precise than pulling data from your pipeline, but it's quick, it shows where people disagree, and it tells you which metric to measure properly first.
What is a good DORA score?
There's no pass mark. DORA's research finds that the best-performing teams deploy often, get changes to production quickly and recover fast, while keeping failure and rework rates low. Speed and stability tend to go together rather than trade off. Compare your team with its own last result first.
What's the difference between DORA and SPACE?
DORA measures software delivery with a small set of metrics. SPACE is broader: it covers how developers feel, how they collaborate and how work flows, as well as output. Many teams use DORA for delivery and SPACE for the wider picture. TeamRetro has a SPACE Framework Health Check too.
What is change lead time?
The time from a change being committed to version control to that change running in production.

Based on DORA's software delivery performance metrics (dora.dev). TeamRetro isn't affiliated with DORA or Google.

Related health checks