Deploy Frequency Target

Daily deploys. The target.

DORA frequency targets

Elite: multiple deploys per day. High: weekly to daily. Medium: weekly to monthly. Low: less than monthly.

Frequency correlates with reliability, not against it. Elite performers also have the lowest failure rate.

The target depends on team maturity and risk profile, but more frequent is almost always better.

Setting your target

Where you are now: pull deploy logs from CI for the last 90 days.

Where to aim: 2x current frequency over 6 months. Doubling is a stretch goal that surfaces real blockers.

Don't aim for elite if you're at low. The maturity gap is too big in one cycle.

Measure honestly

Production deploys per service per day. Not aggregate counts (a 100-service monorepo with 1 deploy per service per week is not elite).

Exclude config-only deploys if they don't reach the same risk profile. Be consistent.

Surface in a dashboard the team owns. Visibility shifts behavior.

Common blockers

Approval theatre: 3-4 manual approvals per deploy halves the rate.

Slow CI: above 30 minutes; fix this before anything else.

Coupled deploys: monolith deploys gate everything. Decouple the painful parts.

How to reach the target

Track frequency weekly. Trend matters more than the absolute number.

Pick one blocker per quarter. Knock it down, measure the impact.

Avoid declaring victory at the wrong number. Frequency without health (low CFR, fast MTTR) is just noise.