DORA stability metrics
The research-validated delivery measures from the DORA programme, with deployment frequency and change lead time for throughput, and change failure rate and time to restore service for stability. The programme found that the organisations highest on throughput were also highest on stability.
Evidence grade: research Peer-reviewed or large-sample empirical work supports it.
Use it when
Assessing delivery health and tracking its trend, whether for a team against itself or across the organisation; the evidence that, at the level of the delivery system, reliability and speed do not trade off.
Where it stops working
These are team-level measures of the system. They are never individual measures and never a leaderboard across teams. Once they become targets, Goodhart's law applies.
Where the standard uses it
- DE-3Reliability, incident response, and operational ownershipOn-call, SLOs, postmortems, learning from failure.
- SV-5Engineering metrics and measurementChoosing, interpreting, and not gaming them, including measuring AI impact.
Sources
- Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. IT Revolution Press, 2018. In the bibliography
Used alongside it
- AI-assisted developer productivity contested
- Blameless postmortems practice
- Goodhart's law practice
- Incident command practice
- Service-level objectives and error budgets practice
- The falsifiable scorecard practice
Cite this model
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). DORA stability metrics. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, TEC.dora-stability-metrics). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/techniques/dora-stability-metrics