DORA Definitions & Data Contracts

Purpose and scope

Define what “deploy”, “incident”, “service”, and “environment” mean and how events map to metrics.

Outcomes

• Single, documented metric contract teams can reference.
• Lower debate, faster diagnosis when trends change.
• Stable time-series across teams and services.

Signals of trouble

• Disputes about what counts as a deploy or rollback.
• Incident logs cannot be correlated to deploys.
• Metric spikes after tooling changes without schema updates.

Remediation steps

1. Publish canonical definitions in the delivery handbook and this manual.
2. Version a data schema (IDs, timestamps, service/team tags) and validate in CI.
3. Backfill historical data to align with the new schema.
4. Add automated checks for missing links (deploy↔incident IDs).

Checklists and assets

• playbooks/measure-dora-metrics/checklist.md for field-level requirements.

References

• DORA research; internal glossary entries for delivery terms.