You can’t win them all

Most weeks, I find a few things that GitHub releases that catch my eye. Unfortunately, last week was not one of those weeks. In fact, what caught my eye this week was a project getting canceled.
The book Accelerate popularized the four key metrics of DevOps or the DORA metrics. These metrics offer a great deal of insight and can help guide teams to find out how they can improve.
GitHub had a feature on the roadmap to show Deployment Frequency and Lead Time. These are the two metrics that GitHub is ideally situated to provide, but there are a lot of challenges in collecting these metrics.
While this was not assigned to anything other than future development, I was very excited about this feature, and I am sad to see that it will not be worked on. That said, I understand the challenges of trying to collect this data.
How can you tell from your repository that code was released? Does merging to your main branch represent releasing? What about creating a tag? If you use GitHub Actions for your deployment pipeline, this is much easier since it is the mechanism that releases your code.
Unfortunately, we are left with many other tough questions, like how do you calculate the lead time for an individual item? Is this something that can only be calculated if you use GitHub issues? What if you use conventional commits or provide a changelog?
I’ve also found that each repo, let alone each team has a different release process. Creating a truly generic solution to these various problems would be very challenging.
So, while I am sad that GitHub will not build in a feature, I understand why they won’t.
Do you track any of the DORA metrics? Have you automated their collection?