Data Without Context is Noise: Why DORA Metrics Are Failing You

The "Velocity" Trap

For the last decade, DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, Change Failure Rate, MTTR) have been the gold standard for engineering leadership. And they are excellent metrics—if you are measuring DevOps efficiency.

But if you are measuring organizational health, they are dangerously incomplete.

A team can deploy 10 times a day (high velocity) and have a lead time of 2 hours. According to DORA, this is an “elite” team. But what DORA doesn’t tell you is:

• Is the senior architect on the verge of burnout because they are reviewing every single PR?
• Are we growing our team’s capabilities so they can address the future roadmap?
• Are the deliverables actually addressing the feature requirements?

The Missing Variable: Context

At 50+ engineers, speed is rarely the problem. Alignment and sustainability are the problems.

Metrics without context are just noise. If velocity drops by 20%, a dashboard tells you “something is wrong.” It doesn’t tell you why.

• Is it because the team is refactoring legacy code (good)?
• Is it because you moved them to a new tech stack they don’t know (bad)?
• Is it because they are stuck in too many meetings (fixable)?

The New Metrics of Engineering Intelligence

To run a sustainable organization, you need to measure capacity and risk, not just output.

• Skill coverage: Do we actually have the skills required to maintain the code we are shipping so fast?
• Cognitive load: How fragmented is the team’s time? Context switching kills velocity faster than bad tooling.
• The bus factor: Who are the single points of failure in your delivery pipeline?

The NotchUp Approach

NotchUp acts as the contextual layer on top of your metrics. We connect output (GitHub and Jira) with human reality (skills and capacity).

We don’t just tell you how fast you are going; we tell you if you have the fuel—your people—to keep going.

Stop measuring the machine. Start measuring the people with NotchUp