Measure

Lead time

You might say: change lead time, delivery time

The elapsed time from a code commit to a successful production deployment. For a ticket flow, pair it with the ticket-to-commit interval so the waiting point stays visible.

What it does

Shows how long a change takes to travel from implementation to usable production software.

Ask

When did the measured change start, when did it run successfully in production, and where did it wait?

What to look for

1. A duration from commit to production on a delivery dashboard
2. Percentiles or bands rather than one average
3. A breakdown of coding, checks, review, queue, and deployment time

Sources

1. DORA, A history of DORA’s software delivery metrics, From four keys to five (2024)Change lead time: Time from code commit to successful production deployment.
2. Nicole Forsgren et al., Accelerate, Chapter 2: Measuring Performance, p. 15We measured product delivery lead time as the time it takes to go from code committed to code successfully running in production

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Lead time" (lead-time) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

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