Deployment Frequency Explained (DORA metric)

March 5, 2024
By Axify.io
Reading time 🕒 8 min

One of the crucial tasks of the development and DevOps teams is to constantly deliver more value to the clients - more frequently and with more quality. Different practices have been introduced aiming to make engineering teams more efficient and agile in the software development process. For the software teams, it is very important to identify the blockers in the software delivery process and to optimize the value stream. 

In this article we elaborate the Deployment Frequency metrics, one of the key DORA metrics. 

DORA Metrics - Quick Introduction 

As a result of the DevOps acceleration survey – in 2015 Google established the program called DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) group. In 2018 they published their study Accelerate introducing the DORA Metrics – a concept that defines 4 key metrics that can distinguish the high-performance development teams from the average ones: 

• Deployment Frequency (DF) – measures the frequency at which code is deployed successfully to a production environment. Engineering teams tend to deliver new features to clients as soon as possible, so this metric is useful to understand how frequently that happens.
• Lead Time for Changes (LTFC) – this metric shows how long it takes for a change to appear in the production environment, by looking at the average time between the first commit made in the dev environment and when that feature is successfully running in production.
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) – measures the time needed for the system to recover from an incident in production. To improve the MTTR – DevOps should constantly monitor the production environment.
• Change Failure Rate (CFR) – measures the percent of  deployments causing a failure in production, and is calculated by dividing the number of failures by the total number of deployments.

What is Deployment Frequency - Definition

As mentioned above - deployment frequency measures the frequency at which code is deployed successfully to a production environment. It is one of the most tracked DORA metrics. In software, deployment frequency is the proxy of the batch size (from LEAN paradigm). Reducing batch sizes reduces cycle times and variability in flow, accelerates feedback, reduces risk and overhead, improves efficiency.

So, deployment frequency basically tracks the size of the batch in production. For example, fewer deployments could mean bigger chunks of changes, while more frequent deployments mean smaller changes. We want more frequent and smaller changes, since it accelerates flow and reduces variability. 

Why is Deployment Frequency Important?

By deploying a small number of changes frequently, the risks associated with the deployment are reduced: smaller changes means less chance of unintended and unwanted consequences. In addition, it allows you to get feedback faster. Smaller issues will flow faster, and will enable higher deployment frequency.

Higher deployment frequency means more changes to the product which brings more value sooner and frequently. It will lead to more feedback and accordingly to better products and more revenue.

How to Calculate Deployment Frequency?

Mathematically, Deployment Frequency = Number of total deployments on an environment in a given period of time. 

For example, if in a month, your team deploys 3 times in the first week, 9 times in the second week, 7 times in the third and 5 times in the final week, then your deployment frequency is six deployments per week. Or, approximately - one deployment per day.

You can also calculate the deployment frequency by setting up your CI/CD tool to notify you when it runs a deployment job successfully, and record this data somewhere. This automatic monitoring and data gathering is less error prone vs a human. For a faster and a more reliable approach to measure the deployment frequency, you can utilize a special tool, such as Axify. These tools do all the work for you - they collect data from your pipeline tool (GitLab CI, Jenkins etc.), keep track of all your successful deployments, and calculate your deployment frequency quickly. 

What is a good Deployment Frequency?

As stated above - low deployment frequency means to deploy once per month to once in six months. If your deployment frequency is low, you need to uncover the hidden issues in the company. The potential causes of low deployment frequency may be:

• Complex deployment procedure - if your deployment process is rather complex, it could result in errors and slow down the process, leading to low deployment frequency. When you make large changes to the code, it can cause new bugs and compatibility issues, slowing down the deployment process / deployment frequency.
• Poor communication and cooperation – usually, if a separate team is responsible for the deployments, hence bottlenecks occur for the other teams, which can slow down the deployment process.
• Lack of automation - to deploy software regularly – you need to automate the deployment operations, which will speed up your process. Proper automation will help your team ship fewer broken services. If your deployment process is manual - it can cause delays and result in low deployment frequency.
• Large changes - to handle large changes - it takes time to review and QA the change and it involves more people. It takes more time to approve a change, hence more time to deploy, hence it is less frequent.