DORA Metrics Measure Delivery Health. What Measures Security Posture Health?

✓ Human-authored analysis; AI used for formatting and proofreading. Delivery teams have DORA. Four metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore, change failure rate that predict whether a team is shipping well. Thoughtworks recently added a fifth: rework rate, measuring how much of the pipeline is consumed by fixing work previously considered complete. These metrics changed how delivery organizations operate. Because they're leading indicators. They tell you the trajectory before the outcome arrives. A team with increasing lead times is heading for trouble. A team with rising rework rate is accumulating debt. You see it in the metrics before you see it in the incidents. Security teams have no equivalent. What security teams measure today Finding counts. "We found 247 misconfigurations this quarter." More scanning produces more findings. A team that scans more frequently or adds a new tool sees the number go up which looks worse even if posture is improving. Finding counts measure scanning effort, not security health. Compliance percentages. "We're 94% compliant with CIS Benchmarks." This measures the last audit, not the current trajectory. A team at 94% today might be at 87% next week if three Terraform changes introduced misconfigurations. The percentage is a snapshot, not a trend. It rewards breadth of coverage over depth. 94% across 200 checks sounds better than 100% across 50 checks, even if the 50 are the ones that matter. Incident counts. "We had two security incidents this quarter." This is a trailing indicator. It measures failures that already happened. A team with zero incidents might have excellent posture or might have excellent luck. You can't tell. By the time the count goes up, the damage is done. None of these answer the question delivery teams answer with DORA: are we getting better, and how fast? The mapping The five DORA metrics adapt directly to security posture. The definitions are concrete and measurable from eval