The four DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore — are the best-researched indicators of software delivery performance. They are also easy to misuse.
We never use them to compare teams. Instead, each team tracks its own trend and uses the metrics to ask where work waits: in code review, in a manual test phase, in a change advisory board.
The biggest improvements usually come from shrinking batch size. Smaller pull requests get reviewed faster, fail less often and are easier to roll back — improving all four metrics at once.
Automate collection from your version control and deployment tools so the numbers are always current and nobody spends Friday afternoon filling in a spreadsheet.