The Deployment frequency indicates how often a team successfully deployed changes in production per week, therefore delivering value to customers frequently. These can be fixes, improvements, or new features.
As part of the DORA metrics (link to the official page), this measure, along with the Lead Time for Change, allows for measuring a development team's velocity.
You can display the change time for the last month, the last three months, or the last 6 months. You can also specify the environment to display, either production or staging.
Note that you must configure one (or more) webhook, as well as your deployment environments in order to synchronize the data needed to measure this data.
Reading the graph
For the following graph, the time period displayed is the last three months and overall we can see that the team deploys changes in production 1.5 times per day on average for this period. According to the 2022 State of DevOps report, this restoration time is in line with the evaluation criteria for a medium-performance team.
Although variations are inevitable, we see good improvement in the team's deployment frequency (according to the trend shown by the red dotted line).
A high deployment frequency demonstrates that your processes are efficient and frequently deliver value to your customers, allowing you to get quick feedback on your product. However, since every team also aims to deliver quality, it may be beneficial to correlate this metric to the Change Failure Rate.
Psst! Want to learn more about potential solutions to improve your deployment frequency? Check out our comprehensive Guide to Understanding DORA Metrics!
Calculating the metric
As mentioned in the article on Lead Time for Changes, if a deployment occurs during the "pickup" or "review" phases, it will be counted in the Deployment Frequency. However, it will not be considered in the Lead Time for Changes.
Axify identifies and measures deployments as follows:
- Only successful deployments are counted.
- Only one deployment is considered in case of a deployment that fails and is redeployed later (after rollback).
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All deployments are considered for the selected environment.
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Deployment data can come from several sources on the same or several webhooks.
Deployment Frequency with Azure DevOps
Axify identifies and measures deployments as follows:
- Only successful deployments are counted.
- In the case of a deployment that fails and is later redeployed (after rollback), only one deployment is considered.
- All deployments are considered for the selected environment.
- Deployment data can come from multiple sources on a single or multiple webhooks.
- For Azure DevOps, since a deployment can have multiple repositories, Axify will count one deployment per repos associated with the deployment. For example, if 10 repos are associated with 1 production deployment, the counter will show 10 deployments.
To learn more about the variation indicator and its calculation, check out this article!