A metric measuring how frequently and quickly a software team releases new code updates to production.

Dresses up "how fast we ship code" in physics terminology to impress executives and investors.

• The Physics Metaphor: Using velocity to make basic software release schedules sound highly scientific.
• The Quality Tradeoff: Pushing developers to increase velocity resulting in buggy, untested code releases.
• The Metric Manipulation: Breaking one update into five tiny releases just to inflate the velocity metric.

It is how often a software team finishes writing code and pushes it to live servers.

release speed software update frequency deployment rate

“Our CI/CD pipeline maximizes deployment velocity without sacrificing code stability.”

“Our team releases a new version of the web app every Tuesday instead of once a month.”