Open Standards Emerge for Engineering Metrics
The DORA framework for measuring engineering efficiency is evolving with a growing adoption of open data conventions. A recent DoraHacks newsletter highlighted the use of schema.org markups to improve the discoverability and interoperability of performance data. This trend reflects a move toward community-driven standards for tooling and transparency, which is becoming an expectation for platform engineering teams.
- The original four DORA metrics are Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery. A fifth metric, Reliability, was added to provide a more comprehensive view of performance. These metrics aim to measure both the speed and stability of the software delivery process. - "Elite" DevOps teams, as defined by DORA, deploy code on-demand (multiple times a day), have a lead time for changes of less than a day, a change failure rate of under 15%, and a mean time to recovery of less than an hour. In contrast, low-performing teams may deploy less than once a month and take between one week and one month to restore service after an incident. - Schema.org is a collaborative project launched in 2011 by Google, Yahoo, and Bing (later joined by Yandex) to create a single, unified vocabulary for structured data on the web. While initially for web content, its `Dataset` schema can be used to describe collections of data in various formats, making it adaptable for engineering metrics. - The adoption of open standards like OpenTelemetry is a key driver for achieving observability in complex systems. OpenTelemetry, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project, provides a vendor-neutral way to generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces), which can help prevent vendor lock-in. - While DORA metrics are valuable for assessing team and system performance, they are not intended for individual performance reviews as they lack the necessary context for evaluating individual contributions. Effective implementation focuses on identifying and improving systemic issues within the engineering process. - Platform engineering is increasingly adopting GitOps as a standard for continuous delivery, using tools like Argo CD, GitLab, and GitHub Actions. This approach uses a Git repository as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application management, which enhances auditability and simplifies rollbacks. - Internal developer portals, with Backstage being a leading open-source example, are becoming a common way for platform teams to expose their services and tooling. Successful portal adoption treats the portal as an internal product with dedicated owners and a focus on addressing developer pain points. - The push for open standards in engineering is not limited to software. Organizations like ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and ASTM International have long-established standards for various engineering disciplines, highlighting the maturity of standardization as a practice.
