DORA Metrics Have a Security Equivalent — Here Is How to Build It

Software delivery teams rely on DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time, mean time to restore, and change failure rate — to track pipeline health as leading indicators rather than lagging ones. Security teams, by contrast, still depend on finding counts, compliance percentages, and incident tallies, all of which measure past outcomes or scanning effort rather than actual posture trajectory. A DEV Community analysis argues that each DORA metric maps directly to a security equivalent: evaluation frequency, time to remediate, mean time to remediate, and new findings per evaluation. These adapted metrics share DORA's core advantage — they reveal whether a team is improving and at what pace, before incidents occur. The proposal relies on timestamped, deterministic evaluation data that most security toolchains already generate, making adoption feasible without new infrastructure.