Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

Owned by Parker Ennis
Jul 03, 2024
2 min read

Mean Time To Resolution: Include Remediation of Bugs and Associated SLAs

The Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) metric is valuable for both prescriptive and applied approaches. In a prescriptive approach, MTTR can be used to measure the efficiency of a critical or severe incident response process. In an applied approach, MTTR can be tied to bug remediation and associated Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ensuring that critical issues impacting customers or business operations are addressed promptly and within agreed-upon timeframes. 

Incidents can be remedied in a variety of ways. Some require code changes and a deploy, while others involve a non-code intervention - rolling back a deploy, toggling a feature flag, increasing a memory limit, etc. To track recovery time for incidents when several different kinds of recovery are possible, it’s important to have a system that tracks the human impact of incidents. This is typically done via a card type that represents bugs or incidents paired with a severity field. In this way, no matter how an incident is reported or remediated, the card can represent the journey.

Set up MTTR in Allstacks

To create MTTR, go to Process Health > Cycle Time. Use the Advanced Filters dialog to filter for bugs and incidents at the severity levels that require a swift response. Group the results by severity in the Series options, and if applicable you can also group the data on the X axis by type to compare incidents of different kinds.

Go to Cycle Time:

Enter your filters:

 

Group your data to distinguish cycle times by different severities

Add annotations that represent your SLAs and add to your DORA dashboard

 

Summary: DORA works best for an organization when it’s thoughtfully tailored to that organization’s needs.

While the prescriptive "as written" approach to DORA metrics provides a useful and valuable framework,  an applied approach tailors metrics to organizational needs, focusing on value delivery, customer impact, realistic targets, and aligning metrics like MTTR with bug remediation and SLAs for optimal results. Organizations should consider an applied approach that aligns with their specific business objectives, operational realities, and customer needs for optimal results.