Improve your DORA metrics with Doppler!

The DORA metrics

The DevOps Research and Assessment team (DORA), established in 2014 and acquired by Google in 2019, spent the last near-decade assembling key metrics and strategies to track and improve the software development lifecycle. DORA began with four primary metrics and added a fifth in 2021.

These metrics are a widely adopted comparative framework, allowing DevOps teams to measure and track the state of their development process. Proper data gathering and presentation then opens the way for identifying areas of improvement and implementing effective solutions. DORA helps provide teams with the metrics needed to effectively communicate their development goals.

DORA isn’t everything!

Before your DevOps team gets too engrossed in performance metrics, remind yourself that these metrics don’t tell the whole story. Many factors influence the development process at every stage, including company culture and developer well-being.

Without great product management and design or without care for employee psychological safety and well-being, addressing DORA metrics will inevitably fall short of improving the development process. While DORA is an excellent framework for improving development efficiency, don’t forget the context it’s attached to!

Let’s take a quick look at each metric:

• Deployment Frequency refers to how often a team successfully releases to production. Across organizations and markets, the standard of deployment frequency will fluctuate widely, but generally, a higher frequency of successful updates leads to greater competitive potential and is an indicator of an elite DevOps team.
  • How Doppler helps: Developers face a host of frustrations that decrease productivity and efficiency. Developers often spend more than 8-10 hours a week storing, communicating, and tracking down their platform’s secrets. Doppler’s developer-first approach to secrets management can dramatically reduce the time spent every week on secrets management, leading to significant improvements in deployment frequency. Check out Doppler’s list of integrations to see how it fits directly into your workflow, or poke around the website to find out how features like automated secrets rotation and platform-wide instant synchronization can reduce the time spent on secrets management every week. Time saved in secrets management frees developers to work on the parts of projects that matter most—like developing new features or reviewing code commits—and leads to more frequent and functional deployments.
• Lead Time for Changes refers to the time between developer commits and their subsequent deployment. Shortening lead time is an avenue to increase deployment frequency, but must be handled with care to prevent bad builds from being delivered to customers.
  • How Doppler Helps: Doppler’s Change Request systems allow for documented, accessible review, expediting the review process for changes involving secrets and secrets access. Requests that update secrets are organized in the Change Request list, where they can be reviewed before being approved, canceled, or applied. Doppler's automatic syncing features mean that applied change requests are automatically updated across the platform and organization, eliminating the time spent manually updating secrets after approved changes. Each alteration made using the Change Request system is recorded in activity logs, allowing teams to identify what changes were made, when they were made, and by whom they were approved and applied. If erroneous changes are made, Doppler enables fast reversion to previous functional builds as well.
• Change Failure Rate is the countermeasure to metrics emphasizing frequency and speed. It refers to the percentage of deployments that generate failure in production, though the definition of a ‘failure’ will vary widely between companies, platforms, and industries.
  • How Doppler helps: Integrating the Doppler CLI into your local development environment replaces the need for manually updating and syncing secrets within and across the development team. This prevents wasted time spent debugging mismatched or outdated secrets.
• Time to Restore Service covers the average time between service failure and restoration. This includes incidents caused by internal bugs or errors and external threats like hacking. The mean time to restore service is a strong indicator of an efficient and flexible DevOps team.
  • How Doppler helps: Doppler includes several features designed to help restore service as quickly as possible. It stores version backups after changes are applied in case an update causes a system failure. Automatic secrets rotation and automatic syncing features help revert back to earlier, functional versions or allow teams to apply additional patches quickly.
• Reliability is the fifth and newest metric. It peers into the customer experience with indicators about error rates during software usage, the percentage of time the software experiences downtime, the mean time between software failures, and how long it takes for the software to recover after those failures. Reliability is less about the speed and efficiency of the development team and more about ensuring the final product is market-ready. It doesn’t matter how fast you make changes if the product doesn’t work!
  • How Doppler helps: Doppler’s features assist multiple DORA metrics and how those features work together to make the development process holistically more secure and efficient. Doppler’s blend of secure and convenient tools makes it uniquely capable of increasing the development reliability in secrets use and access and provides tools for team-wide flexibility and accountability.

Improving secrets management improves your team’s security posture and reduces the time and frustration caused by poor secrets management. Check out a free demo to see if Doppler is the right solution for you!