Ever faced a situation when you wanted to deploy a bunch of fields or page layouts and the Apex Tests execution would take hours and hours to complete?.

A recent feature 'Quick Deploy' enables you to skip Apex Test execution when you deploy. However, you will have to run the validation which executes test cases.

The feature does reduce the deployment time by half, since traditionally test cases were executed both during 'Validation' and 'Deployment'.

Here's the official release note from Salesforce http://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring15/release-notes/rn_quick_deployment_ga.htm. The feature is Generally Available and does not require any activation.