DORA Metrics: How to Move from “Medium” to “Elite” Performer? 🚀
In the DevOps world, it’s no longer enough to say your team is “fast.” You have to prove it. Since 2014, the State of DevOps report by DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) has defined four key metrics that separate high-performing companies from the rest.
But once you have your numbers, how do you improve them? Here is your guide to transforming your performance and joining the exclusive circle of Elite teams.
📊 The 4 Performance Levels: Where Do You Stand?
Before climbing, you need to know where you’re starting from. The DORA framework ranks companies into four categories: Low, Medium, High, and Elite.
| Metric | Medium Level | Elite Level |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment Frequency | Between once per week and per month | Multiple times per day (On-demand) |
| Lead Time for Changes | Between one week and one month | Less than one hour |
| Change Failure Rate | 16% - 30% | 0% - 15% |
| Time to Restore (MTTR) | Between one day and one week | Less than one hour |
🛠 3 Concrete Levers to Reach the Next Level
1. Automate Everything That Can Be Automated
The main bottleneck for Lead Time for Changes is manual human intervention (endless code reviews, manual testing, manual deployment approvals). * Action: Implement an automated test suite triggered on every Pull Request. If your tests are reliable, your confidence grows, and your lead time drops.
2. Shrink Your Pull Request Size
The larger the change, the riskier and slower it is to review. Elite teams deploy small changes very frequently. * Action: Break down your features into small, independent tasks. This radically improves your Deployment Frequency and reduces your Change Failure Rate.
3. Master Observability for Record-Breaking MTTR
To repair a service in less than an hour (Time to Restore), you need to know it’s broken before your users do. * Action: Integrate automated alerts on your GitHub workflows. Less time spent searching for the error means more time spent fixing it.
🎯 Why Measure Per Contributor?
Globally, your team might look performant, but bottlenecks can hide at the individual level (a developer stuck on a specific tech, a code review waiting too long).
This is where EasyDORA comes in. By analyzing metrics per contributor, you aren’t “policing” your team—you are coaching them. You identify who needs support to fluidify the global workflow.
Conclusion: Start Measuring Today
You cannot improve what you do not measure. If you are flying blind, you will never know if your DevOps transformation efforts are actually paying off.
Want to know if your team is “Elite”? Stop wasting time with manual Excel sheets or digging through GitHub logs.
👉 Connect your GitHub account to EasyDORA and get your DORA charts in less than 30 seconds. It’s free for your public repositories!
Published on January 02, 2026, by the EasyDORA Team.