DORA Metrics
Throughput and stability moving together rather than trading off.
5 to work through
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intermediate
A team measures deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and recovery time. How should these be used, and how are they misused?
2 min answer -
intermediate
An organisation adopts delivery metrics and teams begin optimising the numbers rather than the outcomes. What went wrong, and how should the metrics be used?
2 min answer -
intermediate
An organisation adopts the four DORA metrics and delivery does not improve. What are the metrics for, and how are they commonly misused?
2 min answer -
intermediate
Etsy released StatsD in 2011 alongside a blog post titled "Measure Anything, Measure Everything". The client sends UDP packets and does not care whether anything is listening. What problem forced that design, and what does it have to do with deploying many times a day?
2 min answer -
advanced
Deployment frequency is monthly and change failure rate is 30%. Which do you attack first and why?
2 min answer
Neighbouring topics
Software Architecture
General material on the engineering underneath an architecture.
SOLID
Five design principles, two of which scale beyond the class.
Domain-Driven Design
Ubiquitous language, bounded contexts and context mapping.
Bounded Contexts
Where one model ends and another begins, and why forcing one fails.
Clean Architecture
Concentric layers with dependencies pointing only inwards.
Hexagonal Architecture
Ports defined by the domain, adapters supplied by infrastructure.
Microservices
Independent deployability, and the distributed problems it buys.
Modular Monolith
Enforced internal boundaries without a network between them.
Service Boundaries
Drawing lines along change patterns rather than technical layers.
Design Patterns
Reusable solutions at code level, and when they become ceremony.
Refactoring
Changing structure without changing behaviour, in verified steps.
Technical Debt
Deliberate, tracked and repaid — as distinct from mess.
Testing Strategies
The pyramid, and the contract tests distributed systems add to it.
Contract Tests
Capturing what consumers actually use, not what the API documents.
CI/CD
Continuous integration and delivery, and the architecture that caps them.
Release Strategies
Blue-green, canary, shadow and progressive delivery.
Feature Flags
Decoupling deploy from release, with an expiry date.
Trunk-Based Development
Short-lived branches, and unmerged work as inventory.
Code Review
Where architectural rules are enforced by people rather than by tools.