GUIDE
Deployment Frequency: What It Is and How to Calculate It
One of the 4 DORA metrics — how often your team ships code to production.
What it measures
Deployment frequency is how often code reaches production — daily, weekly, or somewhere in between. It's the simplest of the four DORA metrics to explain, but it matters for a subtler reason than "more deploys is better": frequency is a proxy for batch size. A team deploying multiple times a day is, almost by definition, shipping small, low-risk changes. A team deploying once a month is bundling weeks of work into a single release, which raises the odds that any one of those changes causes a problem.
How to calculate it
Count the number of deploys to production over a period, and express it as a rate — deploys per day, or per week. The part that actually requires a decision is what counts as a deploy: a merge to a main branch, a successful CI/CD pipeline run, or an artifact actually reaching a production environment. Picking the last one — an artifact live in production — gives the most honest signal, since the other two can happen without the change ever reaching a user.
Elite vs. typical performance
DORA's research groups teams into rough performance tiers. Elite performers deploy on demand, often multiple times a day. Teams in the middle tend to deploy somewhere between once a week and once a month. Lower performers deploy less than once a month. Treat these as a general sense of where a team sits, not a strict scorecard — the exact bands have shifted slightly across different years of the State of DevOps Report.
How moasy.tech computes it
moasy.tech recalculates deployment frequency automatically from what's already synced from GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Vercel, Azure Pipelines and Waroom — read-only, no manual counting. What counts as a production deploy is configurable per team, with a company-wide default as fallback, so the "what counts" question is answered explicitly once instead of assumed differently by every team. Connect more than one CI/CD tool to the same team and moasy.tech also catches the risk of counting the same deploy twice, instead of quietly inflating the number.
See the other 3 DORA metrics in the full guide, or the complete implementation on the DORA Metrics feature page.
Questions about deployment frequency
What if we don't have a CI/CD pipeline?
You can count board transitions instead — moving a ticket to "Done", for example — as the deploy signal. It's a different source event, but the same underlying metric.
Does a rollback count as a deploy?
Most teams count it, since it's still a change reaching production — but it's a decision worth being explicit about and applying consistently, the same way "what counts as a deploy" needs an explicit answer in general.