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Glossary

Definition

DORA Metrics

DORA metrics are four measures of software delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. They benchmark how well a team ships and recovers, but not whether it ships the right work.

The four metrics

DORA stands for DevOps Research and Assessment, the research program that identified four measures that correlate with high software delivery performance.

  • Deployment frequency. How often you ship to production. Elite teams deploy on demand, multiple times a day.
  • Lead time for changes. How long from code committed to code running in production.
  • Change failure rate. The share of deployments that cause a failure needing remediation.
  • Time to restore service. How long it takes to recover when a failure happens.

The first two measure throughput. The last two measure stability. A healthy team is strong on both at once, which is the point: speed without stability is recklessness, stability without speed is stagnation.

The performance tiers

DORA groups teams into Elite, High, Medium, and Low based on where they land across the four. The tiers are useful as a directional benchmark against the wider industry, not as a precise grade. The value is in the trend over time for your own team, not the label.

What DORA does not measure

DORA measures how well you deliver. It says nothing about what you are delivering. A team can be Elite on all four metrics while shipping features no customer asked for and no initiative needed. The metrics reward motion, not direction.

That is the ceiling of activity measurement. DORA is necessary and worth tracking, but it stops one layer short of the question engineering leaders actually answer to: is this effort advancing the strategy, and what is it worth. That layer is Execution Intelligence.

How InteliG uses it

InteliG computes DORA metrics from your real git and deployment history, with no manual instrumentation, then connects them to the initiatives the work belongs to. You see delivery performance and strategic alignment in the same view, so an Elite DORA score on the wrong work is no longer invisible.

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