The key to a successful business is to work smarter, not harder. Collaboration, innovation, and speed are all vital in order to meet your business goals and achieve maximum efficiency. DevOps combines software development with IT operations in order to allow different teams to work together to meet common goals. With the use of a DevOps strategy, the development and operations teams in your company can shorten the systems development life cycle and ensure customer satisfaction.

You have an idea for a new awesome feature for your product and start working on it. After weeks of hard work you integrate the feature into the main code base, fix some merge conflicts and incorporate feedback from other teams. Then, you get errors during deployment, causing issues for your operations team. Finally, after fixing those errors we get to the first release.

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), which was acquired by Google in 2018, applies academic-level rigor to research on software delivery performance. Its core metrics — lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and mean time to recovery – have become the benchmark many use to measure how successful an organization is at DevOps.

The following four metrics are the key performance indicators for successful software organizations found by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA):

DevOps is quickly becoming the future of managing software development projects among companies, from start-ups to large enterprises.

It is a useful DevOps practice to decouple software deployments and releases. While a deployment marks the installation of software in an environment, a release is when we make the features available to our customers. Thus, deployments are not necessarily associated 1-to-1 with releases.