Measure Project Performance with DORA Metrics

Best Practices for DORA Metrics

Use these recommendations to improve your team’s release lifecycle.

For admins and deployment managers:

• Monitor trends over a time, such as the last 30 days, instead of reacting to single-day spikes.
• If the average lead time increases, check for approval, review, or promotion bottlenecks.
• If the change failure rate increases, improve testing and perform smaller, more frequent promotions.
• If the promotions to production decrease, check pipeline stage blockers.
• Combine metrics with activity history to understand the root causes of promotion failures.

For development teams:

• Keep work items small and focused to reduce average lead time and failure risk.
• Follow commit and review best practices to reduce promotion failures.
• Prioritize fixes for recurring failure causes before increasing promotion volume.