5-question quiz on DORA metrics and the key measures platform teams use to track success. Advanced
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1 / 5
A platform team reports reducing "team onboarding time from five days to four hours." What does the onboarding time metric measure in a platform engineering context?
Correct: B. Platform onboarding time measures the new-team experience end-to-end: from "I want to use the platform" to "I have a service running in production." Reducing it from five days to four hours represents a fundamental improvement in platform usability and self-service capability — a signal that the golden path and documentation are working.
Metric
What it measures
Team onboarding time
New team: first platform access → first production deployment
Time-to-first-deployment
New service repo → that service running in production
2 / 5
A platform engineer says: "We optimised our golden path so that time-to-first-deployment is now under two hours for new repos." What does time-to-first-deployment measure?
Correct: B. Time-to-first-deployment (sometimes called "T2FD") is a platform-level metric capturing the full onboarding journey for a new service. It includes scaffolding, pipeline setup, configuration, and initial deploy. A sub-two-hour T2FD indicates the platform's golden path is genuinely self-service and well-documented.
What it includes
What it excludes
Service scaffolding, pipeline setup, configuration, first deploy
An engineering director asks about "platform adoption rate" during a quarterly platform review. What does platform adoption rate measure?
Correct: B. Platform adoption rate answers: "Of all the teams that could be using this platform, how many actually are?" It is typically expressed as a percentage of eligible engineering teams or active developers. High adoption validates the platform's value proposition; low adoption signals friction, missing features, or a trust problem that needs investigation.
Adoption rate signal
Possible interpretation
High adoption (>70 %)
Platform delivers clear value; friction is low
Low adoption (<30 %)
Onboarding friction, missing features, or competing alternatives still preferred
4 / 5
The platform's MTTR last quarter was 47 minutes, and an SRE is pushing to reduce it. What does MTTR measure in the context of a platform team?
Correct: B. MTTR (Mean Time to Restore) measures the average duration of incidents — from detection to restoration. For a platform team, reducing MTTR is critical because every minute of platform downtime blocks multiple stream-aligned teams from deploying. MTTR is one of the four DORA metrics used to assess software delivery performance.
DORA metric
What it measures
Deployment frequency
How often code ships
Lead time for changes
Commit → production duration
MTTR
Detection → restoration duration
Change failure rate
% changes that cause incidents
5 / 5
A platform team's change failure rate for Q1 is 8 %, which triggers a reliability review. What does change failure rate measure?
Correct: B. Change failure rate (CFR) is one of the four DORA metrics. It measures the fraction of deployments that cause production problems requiring a hotfix, rollback, or incident response. An 8 % CFR means 1 in 12 platform changes causes a problem — above elite performers (0–15 % is considered medium; elite is under 5 %). A review would look at testing coverage, canary deploy usage, and change management practices.