Engineering Metrics¶
Measure what matters. Metrics should drive improvement, not create performance anxiety.
DORA Metrics¶
The four DORA metrics are the industry standard for measuring delivery performance.
| Metric | What it measures | Elite benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment Frequency | How often you deploy to production | On demand (multiple per day) |
| Lead Time for Change | Time from commit to production | Less than one hour |
| Change Failure Rate | Percentage of deployments causing incidents | 0–5% |
| Mean Time to Restore | How quickly you recover from incidents | Less than one hour |
Use these as directional signals, not targets to game.
Reliability Metrics¶
- Availability — percentage uptime over a period
- Error rate — percentage of requests or runs that fail
- Incident count — by severity, over time
- SLA attainment — are commitments being met?
Quality Metrics¶
- Defect escape rate — bugs reaching production vs caught earlier
- Test coverage — use as a signal, not a target
- Technical debt trend — is debt growing or reducing?
Developer Experience Metrics¶
- Build duration — how long does CI take?
- PR cycle time — time from PR open to merge
- Time to onboard — how long until a new engineer can ship?
Anti-Patterns¶
- Using metrics as performance targets (Goodhart's Law)
- Optimising one metric at the expense of others
- Tracking metrics without acting on them