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HelpWhat counts as a deployment

What counts as a deployment

Changeline needs a day each deployment happened. Jira has two things that give one without a CI/CD tool: a version marked Released, and a work item that reaches Done. A Jira admin chooses which counts, once for the site, under Deployments in Settings.

A released version (the default)

A deployment is a version of a space in the scope, marked Released, with a release date in the period. It is what a team that releases on a schedule already keeps on its space’s Releases page.

  • With a space as the scope, every released version of that space counts.
  • With a saved filter or a JQL search as the scope, the releases that hold one of its work items count, and only its work items and failures are counted. Changeline looks back 180 days from the start of the period: a release whose work items in the scope all became Done more than 180 days before the period starts is not found.
  • A released version in the period with no release date is not counted. It is named in the amber box, so you can give it a date.

A work item reaching Done

For teams that ship continuously and keep no versions, each work item of the scope whose status category became Done in the period is one deployment. Its resolution date is the day, else the day its status category last changed. In this mode a work item’s lead time ends at its own Done.

Why not CI/CD data

Jira’s own Deployment frequency report counts only deployments a connected CI/CD tool sends to Jira, mapped to a Production environment, and it needs the work item key in the branches, commits and pull requests. Jira keeps those deployments, but an app can read one back only by its pipeline, environment and number, and only the tool that sent it can. No list of deployments with their dates is open to an app, so no frequency can be counted from it.

So Changeline counts releases or Done, and says so. On a site that does have CI/CD data, a JQL scope can still narrow the work to production with deploymentEnvironmentType = production.

DORA here is the research programme at Google behind deployment frequency and four other measures, not the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act. DORA is a trademark of Google LLC, and Changeline is not made or endorsed by Google.