Deployments and Throughput

This report starts by showing deployment frequency (DF) – one of the four classic DORA metrics.

However, deployment frequency leaves blind spots because it doesn’t tell you how well development work is flowing through the system in other places. For example, a team that releases to an app store once per week will always have the same deployment frequency regardless of how well the team breaks down work into smaller and more frequent pre-release pull requests.

To fill the gaps, the report next shows pull request merge frequency (PRF) and commit frequency (CF) by team and author so that you spot bottlenecks and make sure the team is regularly completing work in small batches.

Finally, the report shows dev work days (DWD) from minware’s time model by team and repository so you can pinpoint issues that prevent developers from being able to work.

One word of caution about this report: other than deployment frequency, these metrics should not be used as KPIs on their own without looking at other metrics. If made into a target, it is trivially easy for people to submit more changes (pre-deployment) so that they look busy without getting more done. The result is usually lower quality or splitting up individual logical changes into multiple pull requests just to game the metrics. That being said, breaking up work into smaller commits, pull requests, and deployments is generally a good thing as long as it isn’t taken to an extreme.