DORA Metrics

From the DORA research programme, and useful because they resist the usual gaming: deployment frequency and lead time for change measure throughput; change failure rate and time to restore service measure stability.

The finding that made them influential is that throughput and stability are not a trade-off — high performers do better on all four simultaneously. That contradicts the intuition that shipping slower is safer, and it reframes the argument: small frequent changes are easier to verify, easier to diagnose and easier to reverse than large infrequent ones.

Architectural relevance is direct, because architecture largely determines the ceiling on all four. Deployment frequency is capped by whether services can be released independently. Time to restore is capped by whether you can roll back and whether you can find the cause. A team cannot out-process a design that requires four services to ship together.

Use them as a trend on the team, not as a comparison between teams and never as an individual target — at which point they measure something else entirely.