deploytime

Deploytime is a metric used in software delivery to measure the elapsed duration from the initiation of a deployment to its completion in the target environment. It typically covers all activities required to make a release available, including packaging, artifact transfer, infrastructure provisioning, configuration changes, and post-deployment validation. Deploytime can be recorded per release, per environment, and across teams, and is often reported as a distribution (average, median, percentiles) to reflect typical performance and tail risk. It is distinct from lead time for changes, which tracks the time from an idea to the release in production, and from mean time to recovery, which measures time to restore service after a failure.

Measurement is usually automated by CI/CD systems, version control hooks, and deployment tooling. Start time is when a deployment job begins; end time is when the deployment is confirmed as successful and the service is healthy. Common dashboards report deploytime across environments (dev, test, staging, prod) and by release train. Longer deploytime can indicate bottlenecks such as manual approvals, lengthy tests, slow artifact delivery, or complex infrastructure changes.

Best practices to reduce deploytime include increasing automation, adopting continuous delivery practices, parallelizing tests, using canary or blue-green deployment strategies, and applying feature flags to decouple deployment from release. Maintaining idempotent infrastructure, caching, and incremental rollouts can also shorten effective deploytime and improve reliability. Deploytime is one of several related metrics used to assess release velocity and operational risk.