The DORA framework is built on a premise so foundational that it rarely gets examined. When the research team behind it studied thousands of engineering organizations and identified the metrics that predict software delivery performance, they were measuring what pipelines report. Deployment frequency from deployment logs. Lead time from commit timestamps. Change failure rate from incident records correlated with deployment events. Failed deployment recovery time from incident resolution timestamps. Deployment rework rate from the proportion of deployments consumed by fixing previously shipped work.Every one of these metrics is a faithful record of what the pipeline said happened. None of them have a mechanism to assess whether what the pipeline said happened was accurate.