Formula 1 fans know Lewis Hamilton is one of the fastest drivers in the sport’s history. That is, until he joined Ferrari and discovered his braking technique doesn’t sync with the car. Applying just a bit too much pressure going into high-speed corners throws off the car’s balance, costing him precious seconds – and often, the race. Meanwhile, his teammate Charles Leclerc brakes more precisely and consistently finishes ahead and bathes himself in champagne on podiums.
In F1, performance isn’t just about the engine – it’s about control. Brakes, while intuitively associated with slowing down, are actually critical to going faster. They’re what let drivers push harder, with confidence. When braking is misaligned, even the fastest driver loses time.
It’s the same with software delivery. AppSec might not be the first thing you think of when optimizing DORA metrics – but it’s part of the machine. If it’s fragmented and out of tune, it creates drag. But if your AppSec is integrated and aligned with the flow, it unlocks performance.
The DORA metrics, developed by Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment team, are widely recognized as benchmarks of software delivery performance: Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
Here lies a real opportunity to shift the dial on these metrics, by spotting where AppSec adds friction and tuning it out of the system.
So, let’s grab the monkey wrench and get back under the chassis.
Tuning AppSec to Improve Your DORA Metrics
Let’s take a closer look at each DORA metric separately to see where AppSec tends to create friction and how we can align it better and turn it into forward motion.
Deployment Frequency
What it measures
How often code changes are deployed to production. Higher frequency typically reflects a more agile and responsive engineering process.
How AppSec impacts Deployment Frequency
AppSec influences deployment frequency in multiple ways, some seem obvious, others more subtle: Manual reviews and siloed security teams often delay merges and releases, especially when issues are discovered late in the cycle. This creates bottlenecks that throttle throughput.
In contrast, when AppSec is integrated early and tightly into the developer workflow, it eliminates delays before they form. Automated scans in the IDE, SCM, and CI/CD pipeline catch issues before they snowball. Real-time feedback and clear remediation guidance reduce context-switching, enabling developers to stay in flow and deliver faster.
Even psychologically, embedded AppSec builds trust: developers and platform teams feel more confident deploying frequently when they know risk is being managed continuously—not inspected as an afterthought.
Actionable steps to improve Deployment frequency through AppSec
- Shift security, not just left, but everywhere. Bring AppSec earlier into the development lifecycle—closer to where code is written, not just reviewed—so issues are caught before they become blockers. Early detection prevents slowdowns and rework. But don’t stop there. Extend security coverage across the SDLC with tools for SAST, SCA, IaC, and container scanning to ensure issues are caught and resolved wherever they arise.
- Integrate into developer tools. Embedding security directly into IDEs, source control systems, and CI/CD pipelines enables seamless developer workflows. It minimizes context switching and removes the need for separate review steps.
- Automate wherever possible. Automating scans, policy enforcement, and remediation ensure consistency and reduces bottlenecks. The less manual intervention required, the faster teams can ship.
- Provide contextual feedback. Fast, actionable security guidance helps developers fix problems without breaking flow. Vague or delayed feedback leads to friction and slows delivery.
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Build trust in the pipeline. When developers know the system supports fast, secure iteration, they deploy more confidently and more often.
By how much can you improve Deployment Frequency?
With well-integrated AppSec practices, deployment frequency can increase by up to 2× without sacrificing safety or control.
Lead Time for Changes
What it measures
The time it takes for a code change to make it into production. A shorter lead time reflects a more efficient and responsive development process.
How AppSec impacts Lead Time for Changes
AppSec often introduces delays when vulnerabilities are discovered late in the pipeline, after code has already been written, tested, or even staged for deployment. At that point, remediating issues means context-switching, rework, and coordination across teams.
Conversely, when AppSec is embedded early and seamlessly, it accelerates this metric. Inline scanning, real-time feedback, and IDE-level insights allow developers to fix vulnerabilities in the moment, while the code is still fresh in their mind. Early detection also reduces the likelihood of rework or escalations later in the process.
Actionable steps to improve Lead Time for Changes through AppSec
- Embed security feedback early. The earlier vulnerabilities are caught, the cheaper and faster they are to fix.
- Integrate with the developer’s daily tools. Scanning should happen where code is written—not as a separate process.
- Provide precise remediation guidance. Developers need more than alerts. They need clear and actionable suggestions to act fast and efficiently.
- Automate triage and prioritization. Sorting signal from noise ensures attention goes to what matters most, reducing delay.
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Treat AppSec as part of velocity. When developers view security as a support system, not a blocker, they’ll move faster with more confidence.
By how much can you improve Lead Time for Changes?
Integrating AppSec into the early stages of development can reduce lead time for changes by up to 50%. By eliminating late-stage surprises, minimizing rework, and enabling faster, in-flow fixes.
Change Failure Rate
What it measures
The percentage of deployments that result in a failure in production—typically requiring hotfixes, rollbacks, or emergency patches. Lower is better.
How AppSec impacts Change Failure Rate
When security issues make it to production, they often trigger emergency fixes that disrupt workflows and shake confidence. This tends to happen when vulnerabilities are missed during code review, testing, or integration.
AppSec that’s embedded throughout the SDLC prevents this. With guardrails like pre-merge checks, IaC scanning, and container security policies, risky code is flagged before it’s deployed. This dramatically reduces the chances of introducing vulnerabilities into production.
Actionable steps to improve Change Failure Rate through AppSec
- Establish clear security gates. Block merges or builds that fail security checks instead of discovering issues post-deployment.
- Scan beyond the code. Analyze infrastructure, containers, and third-party dependencies, not just application logic.
- Define policy as code. Codify your security standards so they can be enforced consistently across all pipelines.
- Prioritize critical risks. Focus on vulnerabilities that are actually exploitable in your environment, not just everything the scanner finds. This helps you direct attention and resources toward issues that genuinely affect Change Failure Rate, while also minimizing disruption to Lead Time for Changes and MTTR.
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Normalize pre-prod security checks. Make security testing routine and automated before every deployment.
By how much can you reduce Change Failure Rate?
Teams that consistently enforce automated security checks and pre-merge policies can see up to a 40% reduction in change failure rate, with clear guardrails and pre-merge checks that reduce production failures by catching issues before they ship.
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
What it measures
How long it takes to restore normal service after a failure or incident—especially security-related. Lower MTTR means faster, more resilient teams.
How AppSec impacts MTTR
Fast recovery requires both agility and clarity. When a security vulnerability leads to an outage or regression, teams need actionable context to resolve it quickly. Without it, root cause analysis drags on, and the recovery clock keeps ticking.
AppSec practices that prioritize visibility, context, and integrated remediation tooling make all the difference. When vulnerabilities are surfaced with their severity, location, and potential exploitability, developers can respond decisively.
Actionable steps to improve MTTR through AppSec
- Surface the right context. When incidents occur, teams need more than just an alert: They need details like fix location, attack vector, and exploitability to understand root cause quickly and respond decisively.
- Unify security findings. During a security-related outage, context switching across multiple tools wastes time. A unified view across code, containers, open source, and IaC shortens the path to resolution.
- Automate remediation support. Delivering fix suggestions and best fix locations directly in the developer’s workflow enables faster recovery with less friction.
- Correlate by business impact. Prioritizing vulnerabilities that pose the highest operational or reputational risk ensures teams focus on what matters most during recovery.
- Integrate alerts into incident workflows. Ensure that security alerts flow into the same systems that teams already use to triage and resolve incidents.
- Unify security findings. Consolidate insights from code, containers, open source, and IaC into a single view.
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Automate remediation support. Offer fix suggestions directly in the developer’s environment.
By how much can you improve MTTR?
With strong AppSec observability and remediation tooling, teams can reduce MTTR by up to 60%, minimizing the blast radius of security-related failures. Speed of recovery depends on clarity. When vulnerabilities are surfaced with context – severity, exploitability, fix location – teams can respond faster and smarter.
From Insight to Action: How Checkmarx One Improves DORA Metrics
AppSec doesn’t just shape DORA metrics in theory. It helps drive measurable improvements when implemented well. This is where Checkmarx One comes in.
Checkmarx One offers a unified AppSec platform built for how modern Dev and AppSec teams work: It’s embedded in the developer environment, automated in the pipeline, and scalable across the SDLC. It’s not just about finding vulnerabilities; it’s about removing friction, guiding developers to fast, effective fixes, and giving AppSec leaders real confidence in their coverage.
Throughout this article, we’ve outlined how AppSec influences each DORA metric. Below is a summary of how Checkmarx delivers specific value across all four metrics—along with the measurable performance lift you can expect to see when you apply these practices at scale.
Here’s how Checkmarx supports each DORA metric:
Final Thoughts
As this article has explored, application security plays a bigger role in improving DORA metrics than many development and engineering leaders realize: When AppSec is tightly aligned with development workflows and DevOps practices, it becomes a performance multiplier: reducing rework, improving reliability, and accelerating recovery.
For organizations looking to scale software delivery without compromising on security, the opportunity is clear: treat AppSec not as a checkpoint, but as a strategic enabler.
Holistic AppSec solutions like Checkmarx One help put that mindset into action, embedding security into the flow and turning AppSec into a measurable driver of engineering performance.
Learn more about Checkmarx One here.