DORA and SPACE

Estimated time to read: 4 minutes

Let's start by defining both DORA and SPACE.

DORA

stands for "DevOps Research and Assessment." It is a research program that investigates the capabilities and practices that drive software delivery performance and organisational performance. The four key metrics that DORA primarily focuses on include:

Deployment Frequency

How often an organisation successfully deploys to production? This refers to how often an organisation successfully deploys to production. High-performing organisations will have a higher deployment frequency, enabled by adopting continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices.

Lead Time for Changes

The amount of time it takes a commitment to get into production. This measures the time it takes for a commitment to reach production. This involves all the stages from development, testing, and deployment. A shorter lead time is indicative of efficient development and deployment practices.

Change Failure Rate

The percentage of changes that fail in production. This is the rate at which changes or updates fail once in production. This could mean a bug, system failure, or any issue that requires a hotfix or rollback. Lower change failure rates show an organisation's effective testing and quality assurance measures.

Time to Restore Service

The amount of time it takes to restore service after an incident. This measures how long it takes to restore service after an incident or outage. A shorter time shows a better incident response capability, which indicates a high operational resilience level.

SPACE

is a framework introduced by Team Topologies authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais? SPACE is an acronym for:

Stream-aligned Teams

Teams are directly aligned to a flow of work from a segment of the business domain. These are cross-functional teams organised around specific business or customer segments. They handle the entire lifecycle of their product or service, from design and development to deployment and maintenance. Stream-aligned teams are empowered to work independently, reducing inter-team dependencies and accelerating delivery.

Platform Teams

Teams that enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with a high degree of autonomy. They build and maintain the internal platform. These teams create and maintain the platforms or toolsets the Stream-aligned teams use. They provide internal services that help the Stream-aligned teams to deliver more efficiently. They aim to remove obstacles and repetitive tasks for Stream-aligned teams, allowing them to focus on delivering value to customers.

Complicated-subsystem Teams

Teams with deep, specific expertise that temporarily form around a specific subsystem to help Stream-aligned teams. Sometimes a specific subsystem is too complex and requires deep, specific expertise that goes beyond what a Stream-aligned team can handle. In these cases, a Complicated-subsystem team is formed to deal with that subsystem, then disbanded once the work is complete.

Enabling Teams

Teams that assist other teams in adopting and modifying software delivery practices. These teams are all about knowledge transfer. They help Stream-aligned teams acquire new skills and adopt new technologies or practices. Enabling teams have a broad knowledge of software delivery best practices and are tasked with spreading this knowledge throughout the organisation.

Comparison between DORA and SPACE

Focus

DORA primarily focuses on performance metrics used to measure the effectiveness of DevOps practices within an organisation. The SPACE framework, however, is more focused on the organisation's team structures and interactions to maximise software delivery.

Purpose

DORA helps evaluate the maturity of DevOps practices in an organisation by evaluating key performance indicators. On the other hand, SPACE is more about structuring teams to improve communication, reduce dependencies, and deliver more effectively and autonomously.

Measurement

DORA is a more quantitative approach involving metrics and numbers, while SPACE is a more qualitative approach focusing on teams' configuration and communication.

Implementation

DORA is about making processes more efficient through continuous integration and delivery, while SPACE is about re-organizing and optimising team structures for better productivity and software delivery.

DORA and SPACE are not exclusive of each other but can be used in tandem to improve the effectiveness of your IT and DevOps practices. While DORA and SPACE have different focuses, they complement each other well. DORA's metrics can help you measure and track the performance of your DevOps practices, while SPACE provides a practical framework to organise your teams for optimal collaboration and productivity. By adopting both frameworks, you can create a highly efficient DevOps environment where teams are well-structured, communication is smooth, and performance is continually measured and improved.