Deployment Frequency: Why Shipping Often Matters More Than Shipping Big
Elite teams deploy multiple times per day. Most teams deploy monthly. The gap isn't about resources or technology - it's about psychology, process, and small batches.
Of all the DORA metrics, Deployment Frequency is the one that makes people uncomfortable.
“Multiple times per day? We’re not Netflix.” “Our process doesn’t allow it.”
But Deployment Frequency isn’t just a speed metric. It’s a leading indicator of your entire delivery pipeline’s health.
What It Measures
How often you ship code to production. Not staging. Production.
The benchmarks (these shift yearly based on DORA’s research):
- Top performers: Multiple deploys per day
- High: Weekly to monthly
- Medium: Monthly to every few months
- Low: Every few months or less
Why It’s a Forcing Function
If you can deploy multiple times per day, it means your builds are automated, your tests are automated, your deployment process is automated, and your team trusts the process.
You can’t deploy frequently without solving all those problems first. High deployment frequency is proof your system works.
The Counterintuitive Truth About Risk
Small changes are easier to test, easier to review, easier to debug, and easier to roll back.
A deploy with 200 commits from a month of work? Terrifying. A deploy with 3 commits from this morning? Manageable.
We’ve seen this play out with clients. Teams running 6-week “release trains” where every deploy is a 4-hour ordeal - the whole team on a call, fingers crossed. When things break (and they always do), they spend days hunting through hundreds of commits. Switching to daily deploys feels reckless at first. Turns out it’s the opposite.
Common Objections
“Our customers don’t want frequent updates”
Most users don’t care how often you deploy. They care that things work and changes don’t disrupt their workflow. SaaS apps deploy constantly and users barely notice.
“We’re not Netflix, we don’t have their resources”
A 5-person team can deploy daily with GitHub Actions, automated tests, and 30 minutes of setup. The real blockers are process and culture, not resources.
“Our deploy process takes 3 hours”
Then that’s the first thing to fix. Deployments should be automated, fast (under 10 minutes), and boring. If deploys require 5 people on a call, no wonder you only do them monthly.
How to Improve
The path from monthly to daily:
- Automate everything - Manual steps are the enemy of frequency
- Make deployments fast - Goal: under 10 minutes during normal work hours
- Smaller PRs - Under 200 lines, reviewed in hours not days
- Build confidence with testing - The antidote to fear is a test suite you trust
- Feature flags - Decouple “deploy” from “release”
The Mindset Shift
Stop thinking of deployments as risky events to be minimized. Start thinking of them as routine operations to be optimized.
Elite teams don’t deploy constantly because they’re reckless. They deploy constantly because they’ve made deployment so safe, so fast, and so boring that there’s no reason not to.
That’s the goal.