DORA metrics, even with three developers.
Why measure when you are few
In a small team, you can feel when things go wrong, rarely why. The four DORA metrics tell you whether delivery is slowing down, whether it breaks more often, and how long it takes to fix — without counting anyone’s hours.
They still have to cost nothing to keep up. A team of three has neither the time to build a data warehouse nor to fill in a spreadsheet every Friday.
The four metrics, as Jalon computes them
Deployment frequency
How many finished deployments reached your production environment over the period.
Lead time for changes
The time between the creation of a merge request and the first production deployment after it is merged. When no deployment was measured after the merge, the lead time stops at the merge, and the Metrics screen says for how many merge requests.
Change failure rate
The share of deployments that caused an incident, incidents being the issues you designate as such.
Time to restore
The time between an incident issue being opened and being closed.
Set up once
Connect GitLab or GitHub with a token from the Organisation page, and pick the projects to follow. Name your production environment, then tell Jalon how to recognise an incident: by the issue type, or by a label.
After that, there is nothing left to do: the figures refresh at every collection, each with the number of deployments, merge requests or incidents behind it, and placed in a band from “elite” to “low” when that sample allows.
What the figures do not say
With a few deployments a month, a single incident makes the failure rate jump. That is why, below ten items, Jalon shows the failure rate, lead time and recovery time without ranking them “elite” or “low”: one event would be enough to flip them. Read the trend over several periods rather than a single figure, and avoid comparing your team with another.
The metrics come from the last collection, not from live data. They describe how work flows, never what a person is worth.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a monitoring tool for incidents?
No. Jalon reads incidents from your forge’s issues: those whose type, or the label you chose, marks them as such.
Are GitLab and GitHub handled the same way?
Yes: both forges feed the same screens and the same calculations. The connector plugs into either one from the Organisation page.
Does the lead time stop at the merge?
Only when the forge says nothing more. If your production deployments are declared there, the lead time runs to the first one after the merge; otherwise it stops at the merge and reads as a review time, shorter than reality.
Are DORA metrics part of the Free plan?
No. They need the forge connector, which comes with the Pro plan, at 7 € per member per month.