Deno Dora Metrics: Setting the Standard for Deployment Frequency and Lead Time

Flip over Node and you will get Deno. Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, developed Deno as an alternative while commiserating over the mistakes he made with Node, which he discussed in one of the JS conferences. It’s a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly, built on the V8 JavaScript engine and using Rust.

With nearly 1,000 contributors, 94.5k stars, and 5.2k forks, it’s pretty cool to see how this open-source repository is doing in terms of its development cycle.

Middleware OSS is another such open-source tool that helps track a software development cycle. I used this tool to find out how Deno repository fares, where their engineering pipeline lags, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and what they can do better to improve their performance.

If you’re excited to explore these insights further subscribe to the newsletter for exclusive case studies and more!

Deployment Frequency and the Entire Cycle: Outpaces all the top open-source repos!

The denoland/deno repo boasts an impressive deployment frequency, hitting 183, 174, and 301 deployments in June, July, August 2024.

This consistency comes from effective CI/CD workflows like ci.yml which streamlined their deployment frequency.

Then there are regular, incremental updates, which you can see in smaller PRs such as PR #24565, which is just a dependency upgrade that keeps the repo up to date with the latest libraries.

Also read: Deployment Frequency 101: Leverage DORA Metrics to Improve Software Delivery

Even their lead time is to kill for. Their lead time was 1.90 days, 2.50 days, and 2.21 days in June, July, and August 2024 respectively. I cross-checked it against the standard benchmark set by the 2023 State of DevOps Report and it has done a pretty good job.

Their first response time, merge time, and cycle time are all within the set limits.

First Response Time: In June, the total was 20.75 hours, followed by 13.42 hours in July and 24.89 hours in August.

Merge Time: In June, the merge time clocked in at 12.64, jumped slightly to 12.67 in July, and took a dive to 7.87 in August but it was still within the benchmark numbers.

If I had to nitpick just for the fun of it, I’d say rework time stretched a bit in July, hitting 29.40 hours.

How Deno is Hitting All the Right Notes?

Thriving Community: Deno has a thriving community of around 1000 contributors. The community’s active participation ensures that Deno evolves quickly, remains stable, and continues to innovate.

Nailing their CI/CD: Deno's built-in tools make it easy to set up Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines for your projects. Testing, linting and formatting code can all be done with the corresponding commands deno test, deno lint and deno fmt. In addition, it is easy to generate code coverage reports from test results with deno coverage in pipelines.

If you are also looking to improve your development cycle, you can take a page from the denoland/deno playbook and set up solid CI/CD processes.

Frequent, Small Updates: Instead of going all out with huge changes, they focus on pushing out small, incremental updates. For instance, they carried out incremental improvements in this minor release of deployctl, the CLI tool for deploying projects to Deno Deploy.

This way, they keep risks low and make deployments happen more often—just like the regular, bite-sized PRs you see in the denoland/deno repo.

Asynchronous Reviews: In asynchronous reviews, feedback or evaluation occurs independently of real-time interaction. This method allows participants to review materials, such as code, documents, or projects, at their own pace and convenience rather than in a synchronous meeting where everyone needs to be present simultaneously. It minimizes delays in the approval process, enhancing lead time effectiveness.

Also read: Jenkins Dora Metrics: CI/CD Leader With High Deployments, Slower Cycle Time

Deno Dora Metrics: Setting the Standard for Deployment Frequency and Lead Time

In our 100 days 100 case studies analysis, Deno Repository is the only one that meets the Dora Metrics benchmark set by 2023 State of DevOps Report . The complete credit goes to its creator Ryan Dahl and the thriving community of contributors who has been actively pushing features, carrying out bugs fixes, updating documents, and also improving performance in a strategic manner with a streamlined approach.

If you find these learnings interesting, we’d really encourage you to give a shot at Dora metrics using Middleware Open Source. You could follow this guide to analyze your team or write to our team at productivity@middlewarehq.com with your questions and we’ll be happy to generate a suggestion study for your repo — free!

Also, If you’re excited to explore these insights further and connect with fellow engineering leaders, come join us in The Middle Out Community and subscribe to the newsletter for exclusive case studies and more!

Did you know?

Deno ships with a standard library, providing a suite of modules for common tasks, such as working with files, HTTP servers, or handling dates, without the need for third-party packages.