Posted on

How To Use DORA Engineering Metrics To Improve Your Dev Team

Objective data to measure software development is here, and it’s here to stay.

For a long time, the notion of using such data was thought to not really be possible. Thought leaders like Martin Fowler and Joel Spolsky basically said it couldn’t be done. Clearly, it’s a challenging task that frustrated software development managers everywhere. Shoot, I wrote an article way back when basically arguing that it is impossible to do.

Well, I’d continue to argue that it was impossible to do. But now, with the rise of tooling like git, Jira, and other project management tools, it started becoming clear that the data is there to enable us to get a closer, more data-driven look at what is going on inside software development projects. That data just had to be revealed.

Posted on

The MTTR That Matters

“Mean time to X” is a common term used to describe how long, on average, a particular milestone takes to achieve in incident response. There’s mean time to detect, acknowledge, mitigate, etc. And then there’s the elusive “mean time to recover,” also known as “MTTR.”  

MTTR, a hotly debated acronym and concept, measures how long it takes to resolve an incident on average. The problem with MTTR, though, is that it doesn’t matter.