Deployment Frequency: What It Is and How to Increase It

Deployment frequency isn't just about speed—it's about creating a sustainable, low-risk approach to software delivery. It's the heartbeat of your development process and reflects your team's ability to iterate quickly, experiment safely, and deliver value to your users continuously.

And like any metric you measure, it can be improved.

Imagine a world where your team could confidently push updates multiple times a day, responding to user feedback in real-time and staying ahead of the competition. Now, contrast that with the anxiety-inducing, all-hands-on-deck scenarios of traditional big-bang releases. 

Which world would you rather operate in?

Confidently increasing your deployment frequency means you can push updates to users faster without breaking things. It's about finding the sweet spot between speed and stability, between innovation and reliability. However, it’s going to require a shift in processes, tools, and (often) culture.

Fortunately, we can help.

Below, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about deployment frequency to better measure and improve it—and we’ll also talk about how feature management platforms can dramatically increase your deployment frequency without sacrificing stability or user experience.

What is deployment frequency?

Deployment frequency refers to the entire process of taking code from a developer's machine to a production environment.. 

This includes:

1. Merging code changes into the main branch
2. Running automated tests
3. Building the application
4. Deploying to staging environments
5. Conducting any necessary manual checks
6. Finally, shipping to production

A high deployment frequency indicates that your team can move quickly from idea to implementation. That means responding rapidly to user feedback, market changes, or emerging issues. It suggests a level of confidence in your development and deployment processes, as well as a culture that values continuous improvement and iteration.

How to measure deployment frequency

Deployment frequency is typically measured as the number of successful deployments to production over a given time period. Common measurements include:

• Deployments per day
• Deployments per week
• Deployments per month

The choice of time frame often depends on your current deployment cadence and your improvement goals. For teams just starting to focus on this metric, measuring deployments per week or month might make sense. High-performing teams might track deployments per day or even per hour.

It's important to note that we're counting successful deployments here. 

A deployment that fails or needs to be rolled back immediately doesn't count towards your deployment frequency. That’s because it’s not about quantity over quality or reckless speed—it’s about the standard and reliability of every deployment.

The deployment frequency spectrum

Deployment frequency exists on a spectrum, ranging from infrequent, large releases to continuous deployment of small changes.

• Annual or bi-annual releases: At this end of the spectrum, organizations make very large, infrequent releases. This approach is common in industries with heavy regulation or where software is distributed physically.
• Quarterly releases: Slightly more frequent, these organizations bundle many changes into sizable quarterly updates. This approach is often seen in enterprise software or complex systems.
• Monthly releases: Moving towards more frequent deployments, monthly releases allow for more regular updates while still providing time for extensive testing and preparation.
• Weekly releases: Many organizations aim for a weekly release cadence as a balance between frequent updates and manageable overhead.
• Daily releases: High-performing teams often achieve daily releases, allowing for rapid iteration and feedback.
• Multiple daily releases: At the far end of the spectrum, some organizations deploy multiple times per day. This approach (often called continuous deployment) allows for almost immediate delivery of new features or bug fixes.
• On-demand releases: The ultimate in deployment frequency, where code changes can be deployed at any time, as soon as they're ready. This is typically achieved through advanced feature management techniques.

Higher deployment frequency isn't always better for every organization. The goal is to find the right balance for your team, your product, and your users. However, research consistently shows that higher-performing teams tend to deploy more frequently—so it’s a standard worth pursuing. 

Deployment frequency and other DORA metrics

The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team identified four key metrics that measure the performance of software development teams. These deployment metrics—known as the DORA metrics—have become a standard for measuring DevOps performance:

1. Deployment frequency: How often an organization successfully releases to production, ranging from yearly to multiple times per day.
2. Lead time for changes: The time it takes for a commit to go from code to production, measuring the speed of software delivery.
3. Change failure rate: The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production, indicating the stability and quality of releases.
4. Mean time to restore (MTTR): How long it takes to recover from a failure in production, reflecting the team's ability to respond to and resolve incidents.

These DORA metrics are interconnected, often influencing each other in various ways. For example, higher deployment frequency typically correlates with shorter lead times and can lead to lower change failure rates over time as teams get better at deploying smaller, less risky changes. It can also contribute to lower MTTR because teams practicing frequent deployments often have streamlined processes for pushing fixes.

Factors affecting deployment frequency

Deployment frequency isn't just a matter of deciding to deploy more often. If only it were that easy. There’s a complex interplay between technical, process-related, and cultural factors that determine your frequency:

Technical factors

• Infrastructure and environment management: Cloud-based infrastructure and containerization facilitate more frequent deployments, while legacy systems might limit options.
• Automation tools: Robust CI/CD pipelines automate many steps in the deployment process to reduce manual effort and errors.
• Monitoring and observability: Advanced monitoring tools provide real-time insights into application performance that make it easier to detect and address issues quickly.
• Application architecture: Microservices architecture can allow for more frequent, independent deployments of individual components, while monolithic applications might require more extensive testing and coordination.

Process-related factors

• Approval processes: Streamlined, automated approvals allow rapid deployments, while complex, multi-layer approval requirements can slow down the process.
• Testing practices: Comprehensive, automated testing empower confident, frequent deployments, while over-reliance on manual testing can create bottlenecks.
• Release planning: Adopting a continuous delivery model allows for more frequent, smaller releases, unlike traditional "big bang" release planning.
• Change management: Effective change management processes that handle frequent, small changes can support higher deployment frequency.
• Incident response: Well-defined incident response processes can make teams more comfortable with frequent deployments, knowing they can quickly address any issues.

Cultural factors

• Risk tolerance: A culture that accepts calculated risks and values learning from failures can encourage more frequent deployments.
• Team structure: Cross-functional teams with end-to-end ownership of services can deploy more independently and frequently.
• Leadership support: Leaders who understand and champion the benefits of frequent deployments can drive organizational change.
• Continuous improvement mindset: Teams that embrace continuous improvement are more likely to work on gradually increasing their deployment frequency.
• Trust and autonomy: Teams that are trusted and given autonomy to make deployment decisions can move faster.
• Customer-centric focus: Organizations that prioritize rapid response to customer needs are more likely to adopt frequent deployment practices.

9 strategies to increase deployment frequency 

Below, we’ll walk you through a few strategies you can use to increase your deployment frequency while maintaining (or even improving) quality and stability. Don’t try to adopt everything at once. Instead, start small with incremental changes. 

1. Implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)

Adopting a robust CI/CD pipeline is foundational to increasing deployment frequency. CI/CD automates the build, test, and deployment processes, reducing manual errors and speeding up the entire delivery cycle. With a well-implemented CI/CD pipeline, every code commit can potentially be a production-ready deployment, enabling teams to deploy multiple times a day if needed.

2. Break down large releases into smaller, more manageable chunks

Instead of bundling several changes into infrequent, large releases, aim for smaller, more focused releases. This approach reduces the complexity and risk of each deployment, making it easier to test, deploy, and rollback if necessary. Smaller releases also provide faster feedback, allowing teams to iterate quicker based on user responses.

3. Adopt feature flags for controlled rollouts

Feature flags allow your teams to decouple code deployment from feature release. Wrapping new features or changes in feature flags lets you deploy code to production more frequently without immediately exposing it to all users. This technique enables gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and quick rollbacks without needing to redeploy, significantly reducing the risk of frequent deployments.

4. Improve and automate testing processes

Comprehensive, automated testing helps maintain quality while increasing deployment frequency. Invest in building a robust suite of unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. Automated testing lets you catch issues earlier in the development process and provides confidence to deploy more frequently.

5. Implement infrastructure as code (IaC)

IaC allows you to manage and provision your infrastructure through code rather than manual processes. This approach guarantees consistency across environments, reduces configuration errors, and makes it easier to spin up new environments for testing or deployment. With IaC, you can more confidently and frequently update your infrastructure alongside your application code.

6. Create a culture of continuous improvement

Frequent deployments start with your development team. Encourage your team to constantly look for ways to streamline the deployment process. Regularly conduct retrospectives to identify bottlenecks and implement improvements. Create an environment where team members feel safe to experiment with new approaches and learn from failures.

7. Start robust monitoring and observability

Implement comprehensive logging, metrics collection, and distributed tracing. This visibility allows your teams to quickly detect and respond to issues, making them more comfortable with frequent changes to production.

8. Adopt trunk-based development

Trunk-based development (where developers frequently merge small changes directly to the main branch) can significantly increase deployment frequency. This approach reduces the complexity of merges, minimizes long-lived feature branches, and keeps the main branch in a deployable state at all times.

9. Streamline approval processes

Review your current approval processes and look for ways to streamline them without compromising security or quality. Consider implementing automated approvals for certain types of changes, or adopt a "trust but verify" approach where deployments can proceed automatically but are closely monitored.

How LaunchDarkly enables safe, frequent deployments

Higher deployment frequency ultimately comes down to balancing speed and safety. LaunchDarkly's feature management platform offers a powerful solution to this dilemma by enabling teams to deploy more frequently while improving the stability of their systems. Here’s how:

Decoupling deployment from release

LaunchDarkly's core functionality revolves around feature flags, which allow teams to separate code deployment from feature release. This decoupling lets you deploy code without immediate user impact—new features can be deployed to production in a dormant state, allowing teams to deploy more frequently without risking user-facing changes.

Plus, it allows for gradual rollouts. You can release features to a small percentage of users initially before progressively rolling it out to everyone.

Implementing progressive delivery

LaunchDarkly enables targeted rollouts via progressive delivery, where new features can be released to specific user segments, environments, or regions to reduce the potential impact of issues. LaunchDarkly also facilitates safe experimentation in production, letting teams test new features with a subset of users and gather real-world data before full release. This combination of targeted rollouts and in-production experimentation empowers teams to balance rapid delivery with system stability and user satisfaction.

Enabling continuous delivery

LaunchDarkly seamlessly integrates with CI/CD pipelines to support a true continuous delivery model. Feature flags help teams maintain an always-deployable main branch, as new features can be deployed without immediate activation. This approach also simplifies branching strategies, reducing the need for complex branch management since features can be developed and deployed independently.

Improving rapid incident response

LaunchDarkly reduces mean time to recovery during incidents. It enables quick rollbacks by allowing teams to instantly disable problematic features without requiring a full code rollback or redeployment. Plus, LaunchDarkly supports targeted fixes, where teams can apply fixes or rollbacks to specific user segments or environments to minimize overall disruption.

Improve your deployment processes with LaunchDarkly

Increasing your deployment frequency is a powerful way to transform your software delivery performance—and LaunchDarkly helps make it possible.

Our feature management platform addresses many of these challenges head-on by:

• Decoupling deployment from release
• Enabling progressive delivery
• Providing real-time control over features

Don't let deployment fears hold you back—embrace the future of software delivery with LaunchDarkly. Start your free trial today.