Comparison
Deployment frequencyvsDORA metrics
Deployment frequency
the team ships eleven times a day and the other one ships every second Thursday.
How often changes reach production. It is a proxy for batch size and for how much friction sits between finished code and users, which is why it correlates with almost everything else. Raising it is not about deploying more for its own sake: it is about removing the fixed cost that made a big release rational in the first place.
Full entry →DORA metrics
the argument about whether the team was fast stopped once four numbers were on the wall.
Four measures of delivery performance from the DORA research: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service. Their power is the pairing — two speed measures against two stability measures — which kills the assumption that going faster must mean breaking more. They are diagnostic rather than a target, and turning them into individual or team goals is the fastest way to make them useless.
Full entry →