deployment frequency
also: deployment rate, release frequency
A DevOps metric measuring how often code changes are released to production, typically expressed as deployments per day, week, or month.
Deployment frequency quantifies how frequently a team pushes updates to live systems. High deployment frequency indicates a mature CI/CD pipeline and enables rapid feedback cycles, while low frequency suggests bottlenecks or risk-averse processes.
This metric is one of the four key DevOps metrics (alongside lead time, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate) used to assess software delivery performance. For example, a team deploying 10 times per day demonstrates higher velocity than one deploying quarterly.
Tracking deployment frequency helps identify inefficiencies in build, test, and release automation. It encourages teams to break work into smaller, safer increments and invest in infrastructure-as-code and containerization to reduce risk.