Glossary
Lead time for changes
The time from when code is committed to when it is running successfully in production, one of the four DORA metrics.
Also called: change lead time
Lead time for changes measures the time from when code is committed to when it is running successfully in production, one of the four DORA metrics used to gauge software delivery speed. Elite teams in DORA's research complete this in under a day; lower-performing teams can take months.
Lead time differs from deployment frequency in that it measures the speed of a single change moving through the pipeline, code review, testing, approval, release, rather than how often deployments happen overall; a team could deploy frequently while any individual change still takes a long time to get through review or a slow test suite. It is closely related to cycle time, though cycle time is sometimes defined more broadly to include time from when work starts, not just from commit.
Lead time matters because it reflects how much friction exists in the path from finished code to running software, friction in code review, CI pipelines, change approval, or deployment tooling, that slows a team down independent of how skilled the engineers are. A common pitfall is measuring lead time only for successful changes and ignoring work that stalls in review or gets abandoned, which understates real delivery friction.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026