For years, teams compared themselves with DORA's four performance tiers: low, medium, high and elite. The 2025 DORA report retired them. In their place are team archetypes that describe how delivery performance combines with factors such as team well-being and product outcomes.
The five metrics
The measures themselves remain. DORA now groups five metrics into two families. Throughput covers change lead time, deployment frequency and failed deployment recovery time. Instability covers change fail rate and deployment rework rate, the share of deployments that are unplanned fixes for incidents in production.
DORA's research has long found that throughput and stability move together rather than trading off against each other. Teams that ship smaller changes more often also tend to recover faster and fail less.
What to do with the change
Without a tier to aim for, the useful question becomes which metric constrains you most. Measure all five from your own pipeline and incident data, find the weakest, and work on the capabilities DORA links to it: continuous integration, trunk-based development, deployment automation, test automation and monitoring among them.
Where to start
Most teams can take change lead time and deployment frequency from their version control and deployment tools on day one. Change fail rate and rework rate need incidents linked to the deployments that caused them, which is often the first piece of plumbing worth building.