The four key metrics, Unleashed! – Andrew Harmel-Law – XConf Europe 2022

Listed on the Thoughtworks Technology Radar under “adopt” since 2019, the four key metrics are transforming the face of software development. The idea behind them is really simple — optimize for lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and median time to restore — but getting them up and running, and then embedding them within your team and across your organization isn't so simple. Why? To begin with you'll have to answer questions like "when does lead time start and stop?", "which deployments do we count and which do we ignore? (Do infra builds count? What happens if you’re not in production?)" and "what makes a change failure and how do we tell when service is restored?". Then you have to gather all these stats automatically. I’ve rolled out these metrics for multiple companies. I’ll share my lessons learned while solving these problems and also tackle the far more important topic: how you can use all this data to make your teams awesome!