Ship Factory
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A ship factory is a team or codebase optimized for continuous shipping. Deploys happen all day, every day, on autopilot. Good ship factories are beautiful — features flow out. Bad ones are firehoses of bugs into production.
Real Talk
A ship factory describes a team with highly automated CI/CD, feature flags, and deployment pipelines, enabling dozens or hundreds of daily deployments. Done right (with good testing, observability, and rollback), it's a competitive advantage. Done wrong, it amplifies incidents.
When You'll Hear This
"We're a ship factory — average time from merge to prod is 14 minutes." / "Don't confuse being a ship factory with being a quality team."
Related Terms
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment is like Continuous Delivery but with no one at the door — the pizza delivers itself the moment it's ready.
DORA Metrics
DORA Metrics are four numbers that measure how well your team delivers software: how often you deploy, how fast code goes from commit to production, how of...
Feature Flag
A feature flag is a toggle that lets you turn features on or off without deploying new code.
Ship Velocity
Ship velocity is how fast your team gets features from idea to production. It's the only metric that actually matters.