Tag: DORA

Improving Team Performance Measurement: A DORA and SLO/SLI Approach

As a DevOps manager, measuring your team’s performance and impact is crucial for guiding the next year’s roadmap. By applying proven practices like the DORA research combined with SRE tools such as SLOs (Service Level Objectives) and SLIs (Service Level Indicators), you can design a highly practical approach to team performance evaluation.

🚀 DORA and SLO/SLIs practices

There are several framework which can guide you through measuring team performance, but I prefer DORA research with SLO/SLI and Error Budget due to their simplicity and practical application.

Using both in combination we can make a 3 steps plan where:

  1. SLO/SLI provides the method of tracking and implementing improvements
  2. DORA suggests which high-impact metrics to track, offering valuable industry standards for top-performing teams

Lets look at the steps in details.

Step 1: Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Establish team performance indicators that track the core of your day-to-day work.

  • Delivery Lead Time: How long does it take for a work item (or commit) to be delivered to production? (This measures end-to-end efficiency, excluding non-engineering activities like meetings for simplicity.)
  • Quality of Work (Defect Rate): How many defects or bugs were identified per feature, Merge Request (MR), or ticket?
  • Business Value Delivered: If a feature is linked to a business outcome, this value must be quantifiable. An example is the percentage of users adopting a new flow. Use A/B tests or pre/post-release data to determine the net positive or negative business impact.

Step 2: Set Healthy Metrics Thresholds

Involve your team in setting metrics thresholds. These must act as a healthy motivator for improvement.

  • Setting thresholds too high can lead to negative morale and burnout.
  • Setting them too low won’t provide sufficient learning, research, or challenging opportunities.

Examples of Thresholds:

  • Delivery Lead Time: Is our delivery time consistently below one week (or one day)?
  • Quality of Work: Is our defect rate kept below the team’s historical average?
  • Business Value: Does a new feature drive at least a 10% increase in customer engagement/conversion?

Step 3: Create a Data-Driven Improvement Plan

To ensure your improvement plan is robust, collect sufficient evidence of real use cases where metrics exceeded their established thresholds.

Ask targeted questions based on the failing metrics:

  • If Delivery Lead Time is too high: Are our integration tests too slow? Is the deployment pipeline inefficient?
  • If Quality of Work is low: Do work items have too many bugs affecting overall quality and delivery speed?
  • If Business Value is low: Did the delivered feature fail to have a positive impact on the end-user or business?

✅ Final Thoughts: Start Small, Think Big

  • Focus on the Feedback Loop: Start with just one or two key metrics for a single application. Validate the full feedback loop—from measurement to action—before scaling up.
  • Drive Decisions: Metrics without action are useless. Use clear thresholds and concepts like the Error Budget to drive immediate, data-backed decisions in collaboration with your Product team.
  • Focus on Core Metrics: Just like a good coach focuses on the fundamentals, concentrate on tracking the most essential core metrics that define your team’s top-level performance.
  • Small Adjustments, Big Results: Each metric can drive a small, specific adjustment. Many small, cumulative improvements throughout the year will ultimately bring your team to a new level of performance.

Notable Frameworks

DORA metrics are excellent for measuring delivery performance and stability (throughput and stability), but they intentionally leave out key factors like developer well-being, internal collaboration, and business value alignment.

SPACE

The primary framework designed to address these “human factors” and provide a more holistic view of team health is SPACE. Developed by researchers from Microsoft and GitHub, SPACE is a multi-dimensional approach to measuring developer productivity. It deliberately moves beyond just output to include the human and systemic factors that drive sustainable performance.

Developer Experience (DevEx) Framework

DevEx is a highly focused framework that specifically measures the lived experience of the developer. The core principle is that improving DevEx directly leads to improved productivity, retention, and code quality.

Summary

To create a truly “healthy team” metric set, I recommend using DORA for the technical engine (delivery and stability) and then overlaying key metrics from SPACE (especially Satisfaction/Well-being and Collaboration/Efficiency) to measure the human engine.