DORA Quadrant for DevOps
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DORA is a research program investigates the capabilities that drive software delivery performance and stability in organisations across the globe.
One of the wonderful analytical tools DORA provides if the DORA Quadrant. This analytical tool provides a view of the current status of an organisation’s DevOps maturity.
This tool indicated four key measurements, and they are
- Deployment frequency
- Lead time for changes
- Time to restore service
- Change failure rate
Now lets look at the definitions of these four measurements
Deployment frequency
For the primary application or service you work on, how often does your organisation deploy code to production or release it to end users ?
Lead time for changes
For the primary application or service you work on, what is your lead time for changes (i.e., how long does it take to go from code committed to code successfully running in production) ?
Time to restore service
For the primary application or service you work on, how long does it generally take to restore service when a service incident or a defect that impacts users occurs (e.g., unplanned outage or service impairment) ?
Change failure rate
For the primary application or service you work on, what percentage of changes to production or released to users result in degraded service (e.g., lead to service impairment or service outage) and subsequently require remediation (e.g., require a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, patch) ?
These four measurements identifies two aspects ,
DevOps Performance
by Deployment frequency and Lead time for changes
Application Stability
by Time to restore service and Change failure rate
DORA also provides the details to compare your application or organisation with their global studies DORA is performing every year.
You can see the summary of the study DORA has done in 2019
You can compare in which category(s) your application/team/organisation is in by comparing your rating to these industry benchmarks.
If you have multiple applications to assess you can measure these values individually against applications and average to derive the final quadrant.
Altogether, in summary this quadrant depicts how mature is your DevOps process by identifying the quality of the application code and how frequently you can move that code to production !
So this is a great tool for any organisation to use and this must be calculated periodically to track improvements or any deviations from the targets set.
