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’.
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.
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 DORA metrics include:
- Deployment Frequency: perhaps the most critical DevOps metric of all. It 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 demonstrate that the DevOps team is knowledgeable, fast to react and responding efficiently.
This metric is particularly important for organisations developing their Agile DevOps maturity.
Expected outcomes
Reducing Build Failure Recovery Time will reduce the overall Lead Time for Change.
This, in turn, will improve DevOps effectiveness.
About Plandek
Plandek is an intelligent analytics and performance platform to help software delivery teams deliver valuable software faster and more predictably.
Plandek enables technology teams to track and drive their improvement and share understandable KPIs with stakeholders interested in accelerating value creation/ improving delivery efficiency.
Plandek works by mining data from delivery teams’ toolsets (such as issue tracking, code repos and CI/CD tools) to provide actionable and intelligent insight across the end-to-end software delivery process.
Plandek is recognised as a top global vendor in the DevOps Value Stream Management space by Gartner and Forrester and is used by private and public organisations globally to optimise their technology delivery and accelerate R&D ROI.
For more information, please visit www.plandek.com
