What is Lead Time for Changes?
Lead Time captures the full delivery path: review, CI, staging, release. Architectural choices dominate this metric — a monolith with slow tests and a manual release train will dwarf small, well-factored services with a progressive delivery pipeline, regardless of individual coder speed.
Related terms
- DORA Metrics — Four widely used engineering performance metrics: Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery.
- Deployment Frequency — How often a team successfully ships code to production. One of the four DORA metrics.