Continuous Delivery: Gold Standard for Software Development
Summary
A highly effective framework for measuring how these changes affect performance is championed by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), a long-term research program that “seeks to understand the capabilities that drive software delivery and operations performance.” One performance metric that stands out in this framework is “releasability.” This measurement places a major emphasis on software development teams always being able to go to market with their products and acts as the concrete measurement of the efficacy of a business’ continuous delivery (CD) pipeline. Within the DORA framework, there are a vast range of metrics that can be measured, alongside the impact they have on an organization’s software development performance. Together, these paint a picture of an organization’s software development successes, as well as the time it takes to recover whenever a change is unsuccessful. This reduction in incident resolution time — or bug fixing — is one of the significant benefits of developers consistently working toward the metric of releasability. This provides developers working on returning a product to a releasable state with the recent change events that are most relevant to an incident.