At CircleCI, we have massive amounts of unique data on how technology delivery teams behave in the wild. This report examines over 55 million data points from more than 44,000 organizations and 160,000 projects. 

We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all success metrics for delivery; every team is different. However, the software delivery patterns we’ve observed on our platform, especially the data points from top delivery teams, show key similarities that suggest valuable benchmarks for teams to use as goals. 

Our comprehensive data on engineering team performance has identified these four benchmarks: 

• Throughput: the number of workflow runs matters less than being at a deploy-ready state most or all of the time 

• Duration: teams want to aim for workflow durations in the range of five to ten minutes 

• Mean time to recovery: teams should aim to recover from any failed runs by fixing or reverting in under an hour 

• Success rate: success rates above 90% should be your standard for the default branch of an application