2 posts tagged with "dora"

Your dashboard has never looked better. Pull requests merged are up almost double. Commits per engineer are climbing. Lines of code are pouring in. Every activity chart points up and to the right, and the AI coding tool you rolled out six months ago looks like the best money the org has spent all year.

Then you check the one number nobody puts on a slide: how long it takes for a customer to actually get something they asked for. It hasn't moved. In some quarters it's worse. The team is producing more of everything except the thing the business buys.

This is the velocity mirage. The metrics that are easy to count went up, and the outcome that matters quietly went the other way. It is one of the most expensive measurement failures in engineering right now, because it looks exactly like success.

Here is a number that should unsettle you: according to the 2025 DORA State of AI-Assisted Software Development report, developer PRs merged per person rose 98% while incidents per PR rose 242.7%. Deployment frequency looks elite. The system is breaking more often per unit of change than at any point DORA has measured.

Your dashboard is green. Your on-call engineers are exhausted. Something is wrong with the measuring tape.