State of shipping

How often do small teams actually ship what they plan?
Q1 · What slows a release down
Review queues beat everything else — including scope creep
Ballot tally · one tick = one respondent of 100 · multi-select
And how do they feel about their own pace?
Q2 · Self-reported shipping mood
Confident and anxious are nearly the same crowd size
Hundred field · one dot = one respondent · 38 + 34 + 16 + 12 = 100
Q3 · Releases shipped last quarter, by team size
Two-person teams out-ship everyone per head
Tick rows · one tick = one release · dot marks every fifth
3 habits of teams that ship on time
×2
Smaller batches
On-time teams cut scope twice as often as they extend deadlines.
54%
Same-day review
More than half review every PR the day it opens.
63%
Public changelog
Nearly two-thirds publish what shipped, every single week.
About this survey

How often do teams ship what they planned?

Every quarter we ask small software teams the same three questions about their release habits: what slows them down, how they feel about their pace, and what they actually shipped.

This edition compares 100 teams of one to twenty people. We look at whether the things teams blame — reviews, scope, meetings — line up with what their release logs say.

As team size grows, does shipping confidence grow with it? The short answer: no. The long answer is on the left.

Methodology

A “release” is any user-visible change shipped to production, self-reported and cross-checked against public changelogs where available.

Respondents were surveyed between April and June 2026. Multi-select questions allow totals over 100.

yoursite.com/survey