How often a team ships to production, the DORA metric that signals engineering velocity, daily for elite teams, quarterly for low performers.
Deployment frequency is one of the four DORA metrics: how often code reaches production. The DORA research bands the metric into Elite (multiple per day), High (between once per day and once per week), Medium (between once per week and once per month), and Low (less than once per month). Higher frequency correlates strongly with smaller change sets, lower change-failure rate, and faster MTTR, because each deploy carries less risk and is easier to bisect.
Teams that deploy once per quarter ship 90 days of accumulated changes at once. Each deploy is a research project, the rollback path is murky, and the change-failure rate climbs. Teams that deploy daily ship a few hundred lines at a time, each deploy is routine, the rollback is one command. Investing in deploy-frequency improvement is the most direct lever on the other DORA metrics.
See the part of the platform that handles deployment frequency in production.