Yes. Deployments should be quick, simple, reliable and accessible to developers. With automated builds + unit tests you can have simple deployments that take <

Yes. Deployments should be quick, simple, reliable and accessible to developers. With automated builds + unit tests you can have simple deployments that take < 10 minutes if not < 5 minutes without too much complexity on most medium sized projects. This lets you ship often and break complex behaviour into smaller tasks. Exposure to bugs is limited to only what's shipped, so you can be confident that each deployment is correct. I think the idea that there is significant overhead seems to me to be the opposite - frequent small deployments are simple and easy to verify. Single large deployments often change huge amounts of code, multiple DB migrations, and introduce multiple opportunities to fail. If you deploy too infrequently, you can also develop a culture of rushing to get into the release, or being (or your customers being) scared to push to production due to bad experiences in the past.