Lead time for changes

Throughput half of the DORA pair, alongside deployment frequency. First-commit to production-ready.

Oliver Wakefield-Smith

Founder, Digital Signet. Built siemcost / monitoringcost / itbudgetcalculator.

Updated 21 Jun 2026

Direct answer

Lead time for changes is the time from first commit on a change to that change running in production Google Cloud LTC Guide2024. 2024 DORA elite teams sit under one day; medium teams in the one week to one month band DORA 2024 Report2024.

Instrumenting LTC from a GitHub PR pipeline

Capture first-commit timestamp (the earliest commit on the merged branch), merge timestamp, and production-deploy timestamp. LTC = production-deploy - first-commit. Use the median, not the mean (outliers dominate the mean).

LTC vs CFR

Longer LTC does not predictably lower CFR. Teams with multi-week LTCs often have higher CFR because batches are larger and rollback paths atrophy. Elite cohorts have both short LTC and low CFR DORA 20242024.

DORA framework
Deployment frequency
MTTR
Source LTC from GitHub Actions
Main CFR calculator