What is Build Failure Recovery Time?
Build Failure Recovery Time calculates the duration of time between a failed build and the completion of the next successful build, relevant to a particular code branch or pipeline.
As the name suggests, this DevOps metric tracks the team’s ability to recover quickly from a failed build.
As such, it is an important measure of DevOps maturity as it tracks the ability of a team to ‘fail fast and recover fast’.
Build Failure Recovery Time chart | Plandek DevOps Metrics Dashboard
Build Failure Recovery Time drill-down | Plandek DevOps Metrics Dashboard
As per the charts above and below, DevOps Metrics platforms like Plandek give powerful drill-down views to identify the source of failure by project and branch, and to identify the recovery time.
Build Failure Recovery Time duration chart | Plandek DevOps Metrics Dashboard
Related metrics
Build Failure Recovery Time is one of many DevOps metrics used to improve the integration and deployment process. It is related to the popular DORA metrics popularised in Forsgren, Kim and Humble’s 2018 book, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.
Related DevOps and DORA metrics include:
- Deployment Frequency: perhaps the most critical DevOps metric of all. Deployment Frequency tracks the frequency with which increments of code are deployed to staging, testing and production.
- Build Failure Rate: an extremely helpful metric which identifies the percentage of workflows which fail and the overall risk this poses to development. A significant source of risk both in day-to-day development and responding to incidents due to the delays.
- Mean Build Time: a related metric which as the name suggests analyses the time taken for each build. This is a helpful metric to identify slow build processes which affect the ability of the team to deliver software. A steadily increasing mean workflow time will want to be addressed and will drive longer Cycle Times. We particularly like filtering by status to help you keep an eye on slow builds which ultimately end in failure
Key use cases
An improvement in Build Failure Recovery Time will reduce your Lead Time for Change (a key DORA metric) and demonstrates that the DevOps team is knowledgeable, fast to react and responding efficiently.
This metric is particularly important for organisations looking to develop their Agile DevOps maturity.
Expected outcomes
Reducing Build Failure Recovery Time will reduce overall Lead Time for Change.
This in turn will improve DevOps effectiveness.
About Plandek
Plandek is an intelligent analytics platform that enables software engineering teams to deliver value faster and more predictably.
Celebrated by Gartner and Forrester as a ‘leading global vendor’, Plandek mines data from delivery teams’ toolsets and gives them the opportunity to optimise their delivery process using both intelligent insights and predictive analytics.
Co-founded in 2017 by Dan Lee (founder of Globrix) and Charlie Ponsonby (founder of Simplifydigital), Plandek is based in London and currently services the UK, Europe, the Middle East and North America.
Find out more about Plandek here: The Plandek Difference.
