DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is a research group in Google Cloud. They conduct a long-running research program trying to assess and understand the velocity and reliability of the software development process. They try to capture what makes teams move fast, how to measure these KPIs automatically, and finally, how to improve based on the captured data.

DORA wrote a famous article in 2020 titled Are you an Elite DevOps performer? Find out with the Four Keys Project. They defined two broad areas — velocity and stability — to measure four important metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service (also known as mean time to recover). These four metrics are now known as DORA Metrics or DORA Four Keys. Even though they later added a fifth metric — reliability, we still start on the four original metrics to assess the performance.