Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Prizes to recognize those individuals who had most benefited man-kind. Alfred Nobel was an entrepreneur who also invented Dynamite which he intended to be used to make mining safer.
The DORA metrics were created with the most positive intent. They provided a mechanism for development teams to demonstrate that they were improving in their ability to deliver software into a production environment. Like dynamite, used with the right intent, they are a powerful and beneficial tool.
The right tool in the right place for the right people
The DORA metrics help a team understand how effective they are at getting finished code into production. Deployment frequency is a measure of the transaction costs associated with getting code into production. If the transaction cost of getting code into production is low, teams can afford to do it more frequently. If it is too high, they have to wait until they have more value to deliver. The lead time for changes indicates the level of automation, in particular the test automation maturity. The change failure rate shows whether changes are successful or need to be fixed. Finally the mean time to recover shows how quickly the team can react to fix a problem in production. All of the DORA metrics are incredibly valuable at the team level, helping a team identify improvements in their process and diagnose whether they have been successfully implemented. For a team that wants to improve, the DORA metrics are the right tool in the right place for the right people.
