Performance Metrics Glossary: Key Terms
Definition of Accelerate metrics
What are accelerate metrics?
Accelerate metrics are four key performance indicators that measure software delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. Originally developed from the State of DevOps Report findings, these metrics give teams a comprehensive picture of the whole software delivery lifecycle, helping them spot bottlenecks, streamline processes, and promote continuous improvement. Accelerate metrics are in contrast to traditional project metrics, which concentrate on budgets or deadlines.
What are the 4 key metrics of accelerate?
Together, the four key metrics defined by the Accelerate framework provide a thorough understanding of software delivery performance. These are frequently called Accelerate, DORA, or DevOps metrics, and they are widely recognized as the primary indicators of high-performing software delivery teams.
- Deployment Frequency (DF)
Definition: How often an organization successfully releases code to production.
What it measures: The velocity and rhythm of software delivery.
High-performing teams: Deploy multiple times per day.
Low-performing teams: Deploy monthly or less. - Lead Time for Changes (LTTC)
Definition: The time it takes for a code commit to reach production.
What it measures: How quickly a team can respond to new requirements or fixes.
High-performing teams: Complete changes in less than one hour.
Low-performing teams: This may take one to six months. - Change Failure Rate (CFR)
Definition: The percentage of deployments that result in degraded service or require remediation.
What it measures: The quality and stability of releases.
High-performing teams: CFR of 0-15%.
Low-performing teams: CFR of 46-60%. - Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
Definition: The average time it takes to restore service after a failure.
What it measures: The effectiveness of incident response and system resilience.
High-performing teams: Recover in less than one hour.
Low-performing teams: May take a week or more.
Why are accelerate metrics important for a project?
Accelerate metrics provide critical insights that help teams and organizations improve their software delivery performance through data-driven understanding:
- Performance visibility: Rather than depending solely on intuition or conjecture, teams can make informed decisions based on concrete data.
- Bottleneck identification: Pinpoint specific areas in the delivery process where delays or failures occur most frequently.
- Baseline establishment: Create reliable reference points for measuring improvement over time and setting realistic goals.
- Risk assessment: Understand current stability levels and recovery capabilities to predict potential issues.
- Industry benchmarking: Compare performance against high-performing organizations and established industry standards.
These insights also deliver significant competitive advantages for organizations. Metrics enable businesses to outperform rivals by delivering value to customers faster and adapting to market changes more effectively. Additionally, they support cultural transformation by fostering collaboration between development and operations teams, reinforcing a DevOps mindset that emphasizes shared responsibility and continuous improvement.
How can Enji help in monitoring accelerate metrics?
Enji makes it easy for engineering teams to monitor and improve accelerate metrics without the hassle of manual tracking. Here's how it helps:
- Agile metrics dashboard: Get a clear view of key delivery metrics like Lead Time, Cycle Time, Estimation Accuracy, and Rejection Rate—all in one place. Visualize trends over time and spot bottlenecks early.
- Pull request analytics: Dive deep into PR throughput, review time, WIP limits, and PR size distribution to understand how work flows through your pipeline and where it slows down.
- Automated alerts: Stay ahead of delivery risks with alerts on rising lead times, growing PR queues, and signs of developer overload.
- Real-time worklog reports: See how time is spent across teams and tasks—connecting effort with outcomes.
- Cost & performance insights: Link delivery performance with budget usage through visual hour-to-budget tracking, helping you plan more efficiently.
- Retrospective-ready data: Provide your team with concrete insights for retrospectives using reliable, real-time metrics that highlight where improvements are effective—and where additional support is needed.
- Fractional CTO command center: For fractional CTOs managing multiple teams and projects, Enji serves as a single command center. The platform aggregates data from all your tools, delivering objective dashboards and reports that enable you to make strategic decisions quickly, without disrupting existing workflows. Whether you need instant updates on project status or scheduled weekly reports on key metrics, Enji keeps you informed and in control.
By streamlining metric tracking and surfacing actionable insights, Enji helps teams build better software, faster, and with more confidence.
Key Takeaways
- Accelerate metrics are four KPIs—deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery—developed by the DORA team to measure software delivery effectiveness.
- These metrics provide a scientific, data-driven framework for understanding and improving DevOps performance.
- Accelerate metrics support better decision-making, continuous improvement, and a competitive edge in the market.
- Integrating accelerate metrics into project management enables organizations to deliver higher-quality software faster and more reliably.
- Enji streamlines the monitoring and analysis of accelerate metrics with real-time dashboards, automated alerts, AI insights, and team coordination tools.
Last updated in July 2025