By Alex Circei, CEO and co-founder Waydev.
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Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is a useful DORA metric that captures the severity of the impact. This metric shows how efficiently software engineering teams are fixing the problems. MTTR is the best practice to ensure you deliver the right and secure products to the end users.
If you’re wondering what Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is in DORA and how software development teams can benefit from it, read on to learn everything about this DORA metric. This article explains MTTR and why it’s crucial for technology companies. We’ll also discuss the other metrics in the DORA framework.
DORA Metrics: Things You Need To Know
DORA metrics, short for DevOps Research and Assessment metrics, are the best practices used by software development teams worldwide to improve their software development lifecycle’s efficiency, productivity and performance. These metrics provide a set of standards that software engineering leaders follow to measure their team’s performance, identify areas of improvement and make informed decisions to optimize their processes.
A software development life cycle demands monitoring and automation at different stages, from integration and testing to delivering the final product. This process also advocates for increased deployment frequency, shorter development cycles and dependable releases. All the steps of the DevOps lifecycle should be aligned with your ongoing business objectives.
Software engineers need to pay attention to the operational needs of the process to understand the impact of risky build iterations. It will help ensure reliability, better functionality and the finest product quality.
Let’s dive into the four DORA metrics and how they can be used by engineering leaders to improve their teams’ performance:
1. Deployment Frequency (DF)
Deployment Frequency is an important metric that helps you determine how many times you change the production. The goal of deployment frequency is to help you change the batch size to be as small as possible.
2. Lead Time (LD)
As the name suggests, Lead Time specifies the time that passes for committed code to reach its final production. This DORA metric refers to the velocity of software delivery. It helps engineering leaders and their teams manage the product’s development life cycle more efficiently while handling all the requests.
3. Change Failure Rate (CFR)
The Change Failure Rate measures the percentage of changes made to the code due to an incident or production failure. The lower change failure rate means a software development company delivers the right product to end users. A report by the DORA group highlights that successful DevOps teams have a Change Failure Rate of 0 to 15%.
4. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
Mean Time to Recovery refers to a development company’s time to recover from a failure. Despite having a high-performing DevOps team, technology companies face failure at a certain point. A company that takes longer to bounce back from a failure stands out from the crowd.
Everything You Need To Know About MTTR
A failure or incident can lead to a more significant interruption of normal business operations. It can also cause bugs in the system or external system outages. MTTR is the key metric in a failure management system. This DORA metric specifies the severity of the impact. It is entirely different than the other three DORA metrics.
MTTR helps DevOps teams identify how long it will take to address the problem that has arisen. It works as a key performance indicator (KPI), allowing engineering teams to improve their response to an issue. Mean Time to Recovery is a metric that helps software engineering leaders identify how quickly problems can find remediation and how long it can take to ship out new changes.
Calculating Mean Time To Recovery
You can calculate the Mean Time to Recovery by adding up the total downtime and dividing it by the total number of incidents that occurred within a particular period. Your response time to an incident should be as short as possible, but at most, 24 hours is a good rule of thumb.
What makes a high-performing team different from a low-performing team is the time it takes to recover from a failure or incident. For instance, a well-performing DevOps team can recover from an incident within a few hours because every second in the recovery period counts.
How Engineering Leaders Optimize Their MTTR
DevOps teams must recover from an incident within a few hours and fix multiple issues daily. Engineering leaders can optimize and reduce their MTTR in the following ways:
• Make small but consistent changes.
• Build continuous delivery systems to automate failure detection, testing and monitoring.
• Use the right processes and tools to fix the issues immediately.
• Create strong DevOps teams to keep your complex application running smoothly.
The Bottom Line
Using the right metric to identify the flaws in the development process can help software development companies achieve their goals effectively. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) helps engineering leaders identify how quickly their team can fix the issue and keep your application running again after it goes down.
