Concept · measure · registered

Lead time for changes

How long a change takes from a commit until it is deployed in production. This is one of DORA's software delivery metrics. The clock ends at the production deployment, not when a feature flag later exposes the change and not when a customer first asked for it. Over a window, this measure is the median of those durations, which is how the Four Keys measurement summarizes them. DORA's survey asks for the typical time. A mean of the same durations is a different summary and is not this measure. The interval is not cycle time, which starts when work starts rather than at the commit, and it is not the time from a customer request until delivery. Both of those are sometimes called lead time. This concept is only commit to production deployment. It is not deployment frequency.