Delivery Frequency

How frequently per day the team releases changes to production.

What is the intended behavior?

Small changes deployed very frequently to exercise the ability to fix production rapidly, reduce MTTR, increase quality, and reduce risk.

How to improve it

• Reduce Development Cycle Time.
• Remove handoffs to other teams.
• Remove manual processes.
• Improve testing and move quality ownership into the team.
• Move hard dependencies to soft dependencies with feature flags and service virtualization.
• Focus on Continuous Integration with small changes integrated to the trunk continuously.
• Use Trunk Based Development to reduce the risk of lost changes and process overhead.

How to game it

• Re-deploying the same artifact repeatedly.
• Building new artifacts that contain no changes.

Guardrail Metrics

Metrics to use in combination with this metric to prevent unintended consequences.

• Change Fail Rate increases as focus shifts to speed instead of quality.
• Quality decreases if steps are skipped in refining work for the sake of output.