Brendan McCaffrey

Why Engineering Leaders Should Care About DORA Metrics

Engineering Flow — Part 9 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. DORA metrics are often treated as engineering metrics. Deployment frequency. Lead time for changes. Change failure rate. Recovery time. Put them on a dashboard, give engineering teams access,…
CI/CD Is Easy. Culture Is Hard.

Engineering Flow — Part 8 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. You can build a CI/CD pipeline. You can automate testing, deployments, infrastructure provisioning, and rollback. You can implement observability, feature flags, and deployment strategies that dramatically reduce the…
DORA Metrics Aren’t KPIs

Engineering Flow — Part 7 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. One of the fastest ways to ruin a useful metric is to turn it into a target. DORA metrics are especially vulnerable to this. A team starts measuring…
Stop Measuring Output. Start Measuring Flow.

Engineering Flow — Part 6 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. In Part 5, we looked at one of the biggest hidden problems in software delivery: most lead time isn’t engineering work. It’s waiting. That raises an important question.…
Every Handoff Is a Queue

Engineering Flow — Part 5 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. In most engineering organizations, the actual work doesn’t take nearly as long as the delivery process suggests. A developer may need a few hours to make a change.…
CI/CD Isn’t About Automation. It’s About Reducing Risk.

Engineering Flow — Part 4 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. When organizations talk about CI/CD, the conversation usually starts with automation. Automated builds, automated testing, deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code, and increasingly sophisticated tooling all become part of…
Why Platform Engineering Exists

Engineering Flow — Part 3 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. We make software delivery harder than it needs to be. Not intentionally. Most of the friction starts with perfectly reasonable decisions. We need infrastructure expertise, so we create…
Every Dependency Is a Tax on Delivery

Engineering Flow — Part 2 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. In the first article, I argued that software delivery rarely slows down because engineers aren’t working hard enough. It slows down because work spends too much time waiting.…
Your Team Isn’t Slow. Your Delivery System Is.

Engineering Flow — Part 1 A series exploring how high-performing engineering organizations improve the flow of software delivery through DevOps, Platform Engineering, DORA Metrics, and systems thinking. For years, I’ve seen organizations try to improve software delivery the same way: Push engineers to work harder. Increase velocity.Add more meetings.Hire more developers.Work nights and weekends. Yet…
My Data & Leadership Monthly Roundup — December 2025

Opening Thoughts I’m getting this post out a bit later than I had planned. December was a busy month, with lots of quality time spent with family and friends. I’m looking forward to a return to normalcy in January. My New Posts From Last Month Disaster Recovery Is Not a Replacement for Backup & Recovery The…