DORA metrics in Jira, from Jira’s own data

DORA’s five metrics are deployment frequency, change lead time, failed deployment recovery time, change fail rate and deployment rework rate. This page says what Jira gives you for them by itself, then how Changeline gets all five from the versions and bugs you already keep.

What Jira does by itself

Jira Software has a Deployment frequency report and a Cycle time report in a space’s Reports, under DevOps. Both count only deployments a connected CI/CD tool sends to Jira, mapped to a Production environment, with work item keys in the branches, commits and pull requests. With no tool connected, or no environment mapped to Production, they stay empty. None of the other measures has a report.

By hand you can get close from what Jira keeps. A space’s Releases page lists each version with its release date, so releases in a period are a count. A JQL search such as issuetype = Bug AND affectedVersion in releasedVersions() finds failures raised against a release, and a bug’s Fix versions says which release fixed it. A spreadsheet then does the sums, each time you ask.

What Changeline does

Changeline is our app. It does those sums for you, from the same data, and shows all five measures for a space on its own tab, or across spaces under Apps › Changeline, in the two groups DORA gives them.

Throughput:

• Deployment frequency: released versions with a release date in the period.
• Change lead time: the median from a work item’s first move out of To Do to its release.
• Failed deployment recovery time: the median from a failure’s creation to the release that ships its fix.

Instability:

• Change fail rate: the share of releases with at least one failure pointing at them.
• Deployment rework rate: the releases that ship a fix for a failure of an earlier release, out of all releases.

Nothing is connected: a version marked Released is a deployment, a bug with Affects versions is a failure, and its Fix versions is its recovery. There are no bands: DORA’s 2025 report dropped Elite, High, Medium and Low, and says a team improves against its own past. Each figure says whether it is better or worse than the days just before, and its count shows the figure before. Where the lead time goes splits the lead time into three stages, and the Releases and Failures tabs list what was counted. No figure is about a person. Changeline only reads Jira and changes nothing in it.

See The five measures for each rule, Deployment frequency in Jira for the first, and Getting started. Back to Changeline.

DORA here is the research programme at Google behind these five measures, not the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act. DORA is a trademark of Google LLC, and Changeline is not made or endorsed by Google.