What is Lead Time for Changes?
The time from code committed to code running in production.
Definition
Lead time for changes measures how long it takes a commit to reach production. It captures the efficiency of your entire delivery pipeline — review, testing, and release — and is one of the four DORA metrics.
How it’s measured
Measure the elapsed time between the first commit of a change and its successful production deployment, then report the median across changes. It is typically derived by joining version-control history to deployment events.
What good looks like
Elite teams keep lead time under one hour. High performers sit between a day and a week. Long lead times point to bottlenecks in code review, testing, or release approval.
Why it matters
Lead time is what the business feels as "how long until this is live." Shortening it improves responsiveness to customers and shrinks the feedback loop that makes engineering teams effective.
Related terms
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