Body of Knowledge · Glossary
DORA metrics
The four research-validated delivery measures (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore service). Together they describe a team's delivery system, and they move together in high-performing organisations. They are team-level measures, never individual ones, and never a leaderboard.
Where the standard develops it
- SV-5Engineering metrics and measurementChoosing, interpreting, and not gaming them, including measuring AI impact.
- DE-3Reliability, incident response, and operational ownershipOn-call, SLOs, postmortems, learning from failure.
Related terms
- Blameless postmortem
- An incident review that asks how the system allowed the failure and what to change, rather than who to blame.
- Error budget
- The tolerable shortfall against a service-level objective, treated as a resource to spend that gates risk-taking.
- Falsifiable scorecard
- A small, stable set of measures declared when a strategy is set, able to show that the strategy is failing.
- Goodhart's law
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Incident command
- A single defined role, assigned before the incident, that owns coordination and communication so that responders can focus on the fix.
- Ownership map
- The written record of every system, capability and decision and who owns each, checked before and after any structural change.
- Service ownership
- Every service has a named owner responsible for its operation, its interface stability, its documentation and its future.
- Service-level objective
- An explicit reliability target for a service, from which the error budget is derived.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). DORA metrics. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.dora-metrics). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/dora-metrics