Measuring What Matters
Measuring developer productivity by "Lines of Code" or "Story Points completed" is actively harmful. It incentivizes the wrong behavior. We implement DORA metrics, the industry standard backed by years of empirical research from Accelerate.
The Four Key Metrics
- Deployment Frequency: How often code is deployed to production. (Target: Multiple times a day).
- Lead Time for Changes: Time from code commit to code running in production. (Target: Under an hour).
- Time to Restore Service: How long it takes to recover from an incident. (Target: Under an hour).
- Change Failure Rate: Percentage of deployments causing failures in production. (Target: 0-15%).
| Metric Type | Examples | Usefulness |
|---|---|---|
| Output Metrics | Lines of Code, Velocity | Low - easily gamed, meaningless to business |
| Outcome Metrics | DORA, Uptime, Error Budgets | High - correlates with commercial success |