MTTR (mean time to recovery)

The average time from a production failure to the service working again for users; one of the DORA metrics of software delivery.

You cannot prevent every bad release, especially when agents write much of the code, but you can make bad releases short. Recovery time depends on how fast you notice (alerts, error tracking), how fast you can undo (rollback, feature flags, blue/green) and whether someone knows what to do (runbook). The R is used for repair, restore or recovery; say which one you measure. With the other DORA metrics it shows whether speed costs stability.

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Related terms

DORA metrics: Research-based measures of software delivery: how fast changes reach production and how often they fail.
Postmortem (blameless): A written review after an incident: what happened, why, how it was handled and what changes so it does not repeat.
Runbook: A short document that tells someone else how to run a system: where it lives, how to deploy, how to recover.
Feature flags: Switches in code that turn a feature on or off for some or all users without a new deploy.
Blue-green deployment: Two identical production environments: the new version goes to the idle one, then traffic switches over, and back if something breaks.
MTTD and MTTA (time to detect and acknowledge): MTTD is the average time from a failure starting to someone or something noticing it; MTTA is the time from the alert to a person taking it on.
MTBF and MTTF (mean time between failures): MTBF is the average time a system runs between failures; MTTF is the average time until a part that is not repaired fails for good.
On-call rotation: A schedule that names who responds to production alerts outside normal work, with an escalation path if that person does not answer.

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