Lifecycle

DORA-Based Company Lifecycle Stages

1. Foundational Stage (Startup / Early Stage)

• Deployment Frequency: Monthly or ad hoc. Releases are large and risky.

• Lead Time for Changes: Weeks to months. Heavy reliance on manual processes.

• Change Failure Rate: High. Little automated testing; changes often break functionality.

• Time to Restore Service: Days. Reactive incident response; lack of monitoring.

• Characteristics:

  • Code deployments are stressful.
  • Minimal CI/CD setup, if any.
  • Engineers spend more time on manual debugging.
  • Focus is on product-market fit, not operational excellence.

2. Growth Stage (Scaling Teams & Product)

• Deployment Frequency: Weekly to biweekly.

• Lead Time for Changes: Days to a week.

• Change Failure Rate: Moderate. Some automation introduced.

• Time to Restore Service: Hours to a day.

• Characteristics:

  • Basic CI/CD pipelines begin to emerge.
  • On-call rotations and incident postmortems are introduced.
  • Monitoring and observability tools are piloted.
  • Focus begins to shift toward scalability and team velocity.

3. Optimization Stage (Mid-sized / Mature Tech Org)

• Deployment Frequency: Daily to multiple times per day.

• Lead Time for Changes: Hours to days.

• Change Failure Rate: Low and stable, due to improved test coverage and automation.

• Time to Restore Service: less than 1 hour.

• Characteristics:

  • Full CI/CD with automated testing and canary releases.
  • Incident response playbooks and SLOs are established.
  • Developer productivity tooling and platform engineering teams appear.
  • Focus is on reducing friction and optimizing delivery.

4. High Performance Stage (Elite DevOps Organization)

• Deployment Frequency: On-demand (multiple times per day or per commit).

• Lead Time for Changes: Less than one hour.

• Change Failure Rate: less than 15% or consistently improving.

• Time to Restore Service: Minutes.

• Characteristics:

  • Mature DevOps culture and SRE practices embedded.
  • Continuous improvement through DORA metrics and feedback loops.
  • Blameless retrospectives and resilience engineering.
  • Focus is on business agility, reliability, and speed at scale.

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Using the Lifecycle

Organizations can use this lifecycle model to:

• Benchmark current capabilities.
• Set goals for improvement across DORA metrics.
• Identify key investments (e.g., CI/CD tooling, observability, DevOps culture).
• Encourage cultural shifts toward autonomy, ownership, and reliability.

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