We track all of these and publish them on a continual basis (dashboards), with the exception that we capture deployment frequency not commit frequency. They're

We track all of these and publish them on a continual basis (dashboards), with the exception that we capture deployment frequency not commit frequency. They're directly if weakly correlated. but deployments is closer to what you care about. I don't think anyone is saying you should only look at the metrics and not the qualitative factors (what's in all those frequent commits?) but they definitely help drive conversations and decisions. The alternative (pure qualitative & gut feeling) is much harder to get consistent across an entire engineering department.