The engineering metrics glossary.
Clear definitions of the metrics engineering leaders actually report on. DORA, flow, sprint health, and developer experience, with benchmarks, formulas, and where each one fits inside DevStats.
Start with the metrics teams ask for most.
Deployment frequency
Successful production deployments in a given period — daily, weekly, or on-demand.
Read definition 02Change failure rate
Share of deployments that trigger a hotfix, rollback, or incident response.
Read definition 03Lead time for changes
Time from first commit to production. Elite teams ship in under one hour.
Read definition 04Mean time to detect
Gap between failure start and detection. An observability signal, not a recovery one.
Read definitionDORA Metrics
The four signals defined by DevOps Research & Assessment, plus the incident metrics that sit alongside them. Speed and stability of your delivery pipeline.
Deployment frequency
Successful production deployments in a given period — daily, weekly, or on-demand.
Most askedChange failure rate
Share of deployments that trigger a hotfix, rollback, or incident response.
Most askedLead time for changes
Time from first commit to production. Elite teams ship in under one hour.
Mean time to recovery
Total downtime ÷ number of incidents. Lower is better; under an hour is elite.
Most askedMean time to detect
Gap between failure start and detection. An observability signal, not a recovery one.
Mean time between failures
Average healthy interval between consecutive incidents on a service.
Mean time to acknowledge
Time between alert fire and a human on-call accepting the page.
Incident response time
End-to-end time from page acknowledgement to resolution path picked.
Accelerate metrics
The original four-metric framework introduced in the Accelerate research.
Software delivery metrics
Umbrella term for the throughput + stability metrics across the SDLC.
Change lead time
Alternate name for lead time for changes used in some incident frameworks.
Release cadence
The planned rhythm at which your team commits to ship to users.
Time to restore service
Synonym for MTTR — total time to return service to a healthy state.
Reliability metric
Generic family that includes MTBF, MTTR, error budget, and SLO burn.
Deployment success rate
Inverse of change failure rate, measured at the pipeline stage.
Rollback rate
Percentage of deployments that get reverted within a defined window.
Deployment cadence
How regularly successful production deployments occur over time.
Engineering Metrics
Throughput, flow, cycle time, and the patterns inside the pull-request lifecycle. The day-to-day signal of how work moves.
Cycle time
Active work start to delivery. Often confused with lead time — measures different spans.
Burndown chart
Remaining sprint work plotted against time. Surfaces commitment vs. velocity gaps.
Cumulative flow diagram
Stacked area showing WIP across pipeline stages. Reveals bottlenecks visually.
Sprint velocity
Story points (or count) a squad ships per sprint, used for forward planning.
WIP limits
Caps on how many items can sit in a given stage at once. Forces flow.
Flow metrics
Family covering velocity, cycle time, WIP, and aging — the Kanban-flow set.
Engineering productivity
Composite signal for how much value engineering delivers per unit of effort.
Development cycle time
Subset of cycle time covering the active coding + review stages only.
Flow efficiency
Active time ÷ total elapsed time across a PR or ticket lifecycle.
Code churn
Lines changed shortly after being written. A signal of rework or churn pressure.
Scope creep
Tickets or work added mid-sprint that were not in the original commitment.
Escaped defects
Bugs that reach production. A trailing indicator of testing and review rigor.
PR cycle time
Time from PR open to merge. The clearest single signal of review health.
Code review metrics
Review wait, review time, reviewer distribution — collaboration signals.
Coding time
First commit to PR ready-for-review. Stage 1 of the PR cycle.
Velocity metric
Generic shipping rate signal — story points, PRs, or features per sprint.
Deploy time
Final stage of PR cycle — merge to production deploy completing.
Software engineering productivity
What software engineering productivity means, how to measure it without vanity metrics, and how to improve delivery a…
PR review time
Learn what PR review time is, how to measure it, benchmarks, and how to cut the wait that slows your pull requests.
Software cycle time
Alternate phrasing of PR cycle time used in some delivery frameworks.
Sprint burndown
Burndown specialised to a single sprint cycle. Shows commitment risk early.
Context switching
Frequency a player jumps between concurrent issues, repos, or contexts.
PR size
Lines of code changed per pull request. The strongest predictor of review time.
Rework rate
Share of code modified again within a short window of being merged.
Unplanned work
Effort spent on items that did not exist at sprint planning. KTLO territory.
Commit frequency
Rate of commits per player per day or week. A raw activity signal.
Throughput metric
PRs, issues, or features completed in a period. Companion to cycle time.
Team throughput
Throughput aggregated at the squad level over weekly / monthly windows.
Delivery cadence
How consistently the squad ships work — variance matters as much as mean.
Sprint predictability
How close planned vs. delivered scope tracks across recent sprints.
Planning accuracy
Delivered work ÷ committed work. A trust signal with product partners.
Carryover work
Items committed in one sprint but completed in a later one.
Sprint completion rate
Understand sprint completion rate, how to measure it, benchmarks, and how to deliver more of what your squad commits to.
Merge time
What merge time is, how to measure it, benchmarks, and how to reduce the wait between approval and a merged pull requ…
Review turnaround time
Learn what review turnaround time is, how to measure it, benchmarks, and how to speed up first response on pull reque…
SPACE Framework
Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, Efficiency. The developer-experience lens that sits alongside DORA + flow.
Engineering allocation
Where dev time goes: roadmap, KTLO, bugs, hotfix. A reporting metric.
Most askedDeveloper experience
Friction, tooling, and feedback loops players hit doing their day-to-day work.
Developer velocity
Composite of throughput and cycle time, framed as an experience metric.
Engineering velocity
Org-level shipping speed — usually throughput per engineer over time.
Engineering efficiency
How much delivered work translates to outcomes vs. activity-for-activity.
Developer burnout
Sustained after-hours activity, weekend commits, and rising rework rate.
Developer satisfaction
Self-reported NPS-style signal on tooling, ceremonies, and review culture.
Developer wellbeing
Pace sustainability + cognitive load patterns visible in activity data.
Knowledge silos
Code areas reviewed or modified by only one or two people.
Developer efficiency
Output per unit of effort, with effort proxied by active hours or context switches.
After hours work
Activity outside core hours — a leading indicator of unsustainable pace.