Deployment frequency

Throughput half of the DORA pair. How often production receives a change.

Oliver Wakefield-Smith

Founder, Digital Signet. Built siemcost / monitoringcost / itbudgetcalculator.

Updated 21 Jun 2026

Direct answer

Deployment frequency is the number of production deployments per unit time. DORA bands cluster around on-demand (multiple per day), weekly, monthly, and less than monthlyDORA Four Keys2024. The 2024 elite cohort sits at on-demand DORA 2024 Report2024.

What counts as a deployment

Any rollout that delivers user-visible change to production. Excludes infra-only changes that do not affect application behaviour, dark launches behind flags, and internal-only tools deploys. The DORA convention is per-service, not per-org aggregate.

How DF correlates with CFR

The naïve hypothesis is that more deploys means more failures. The DORA cohort shows the opposite: elite teams sustain both high DF and low CFR through small-batch deploys and fast rollback Google Cloud DORA 20232023. See /benchmarks/by-deploy-frequency for the 2D plot.