Engineering Metrics Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the metrics behind high-performing engineering teams — how each is measured, what good looks like, and why it matters.
Delivery
Deployment Frequency
How often an organization successfully releases to production.
DORA Metrics
The four key measures of software delivery performance from the DORA research program.
Engineering Intelligence
Turning engineering data into decisions across delivery, quality, and experience.
Lead Time for Changes
The time from code committed to code running in production.
Quality
Change Failure Rate
The percentage of deployments that cause a failure in production.
Code Churn
Code that is rewritten or deleted shortly after being written.
Pull Request Health
A composite score of how healthy a pull request is — size, review, and flow.
Technical Debt Ratio
The estimated cost to fix code issues relative to the cost to build it.
Reliability
Flow
Cycle Time
The time from starting work on a change to delivering it.
Flow Efficiency
The share of cycle time that work is actively being worked on versus waiting.
Pull Request Cycle Time
The time from opening a pull request to merging it, broken into stages.
Throughput
The amount of work a team completes in a given period.
Work in Progress (WIP)
The number of work items being worked on at the same time.
Experience
AI
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