Improving delivery by measuring lead time for changes

If a development team wants to stay competitive, innovative features and seamless user experiences aren't enough—they will also need a streamlined development process to keep projects on track. Hidden bottlenecks in your workflow can undermine productivity and delay your delivery schedules. Extended code reviews, prolonged testing phases, and deployment slowdowns are common obstacles that can significantly impact your team's success and client satisfaction. Without identifying these issues, it's impossible to take steps to mitigate them.

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Measuring lead time for changes (LTFC) helps you identify these hidden problems and proactively address them. Without these metrics, those inefficiencies that can quietly affect your software-delivery lifecycle will remain unseen, creating delays that are difficult to pinpoint and resolve. Understanding LTFC enables you to optimize development processes and enhance overall performance. It provides valuable insights into the time it takes for a change request, such as a new feature or a bug fix, to progress from initial commitment to deployment in production.

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In this article, you'll learn about the importance of measuring LTFC, explore strategies to reduce lead times, and understand how this metric can drive continuous improvement in your development practices.

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Understanding LTFC

So what exactly is LTFC and how can it passively affect a software-delivery lifecycle?

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In software development, LTFC measures the duration from when a change request is committed to when it is successfully deployed in production. This metric encompasses the entire lifecycle of a change, including planning, development, code review, testing, and deployment.

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When LTFC is not monitored, teams lack visibility into the efficiency of their workflows, making it difficult to identify and address bottlenecks and delays. This lack of insight can lead to extended lead times and a reduced ability to streamline the development process. Consequently, infrequent deployments impede a team's ability to respond quickly to market changes or user feedback, reducing the overall competitiveness of the organization. Additionally, longer lead times often result in larger, more complex changes being deployed at once, increasing the risk of introducing errors or bugs into the production environment due to the increased difficulty in managing and thoroughly testing these larger deployments.

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Importance and Benefits of Measuring and Optimizing LTFC

Measuring and optimizing LTFC provides valuable insights into the efficiency and speed of the development process, helping teams identify areas for improvement and optimize their workflows to deliver features and fixes more rapidly.

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Early access online games are a good example of the positive impact of measuring and optimizing LTFC. In these games, developers engage actively with the community by quickly applying hotfixes, resolving bugs, and introducing special in-game events. Monitoring the LTFC for these updates ensures that developers maintain timely, high-quality deliveries, which keeps the player base engaged and satisfied.

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The following sections highlight some of the main reasons why you should measure LTFC and the benefits it provides.

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Insight into Development and Delivery Speed

Measuring LTFC gives you a comprehensive view of how efficiently changes progress from initial planning through to deployment. This visibility helps you understand the speed at which your team can respond to new requirements, user feedback, and market changes. Shorter lead times mean you can deliver features and fixes more rapidly, keeping your product competitive and your users satisfied.

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Identification of Inefficiencies and Issues

By tracking LTFC, you can pinpoint stages in your development pipeline that are causing delays. Whether it's prolonged code reviews, extended testing phases, bottlenecks in deployment, or even insufficient computing resources, knowing where the issues lie allows you to address them directly. This proactive approach helps streamline workflows, reduces wait times, and enhances your team's efficiency overall.

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Continuous Improvement and Shorter Feedback Cycles

Once you start measuring LTFC, you become aware of it, and with that awareness, you can begin to improve it. Continuous monitoring and optimization lead to shorter feedback cycles, which allow for faster iterations and ensures that any issues or enhancements are addressed promptly. This agility not only improves the quality of your product but also boosts your team's morale by demonstrating tangible progress and quick wins.

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Enhanced Deployment Speed and Quality

Measuring LTFC sets the foundation for continuous improvement within your development process. Tracking this metric allows your team to iteratively refine their workflows, achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness. Consistent measurement provides valuable data to highlight areas needing improvement, enabling targeted changes and fostering a cycle of optimization. This approach enhances deployment speed and quality, creates a culture of constant learning and growth, and ensures your processes evolve together with changing needs and technologies.

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Improved Team Well-Being and Productivity

A low LTFC ultimately means faster deployment and good visibility, internally for your team and externally for the users who will benefit from the change, fix, or feature. Additionally, a low LTFC helps minimize wasted efforts, allowing your team to focus their time and energy on essential tasks. The Google/DORA State of DevOps report highlights that an "Elite" level of software-delivery performance is linked to a healthy, user-centered environment that prioritizes team well-being.

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For instance, by streamlining processes—such as automating repetitive testing tasks, reducing redundant code reviews, and implementing CI/CD pipelines to automate the deployment process—your team can avoid unnecessary tasks that contribute to delays and significantly reduce burnout. This not only fosters a productive and positive work atmosphere but also enhances overall performance by minimizing avoidable delays.

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How Do You Measure LTFC?

To effectively measure LTFC, it's essential to track the time taken at each phase of the software-delivery cycle, from the initial feature or bug request to the final deployment. The following are the key steps for monitoring LTFC, including examples of measuring LTFC for a simple bug fix:

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1. Initial request: Measure the time from when a feature or bug fix is first requested to when it is formally recognized and added to the backlog.
2. Planning: Track the time taken to prioritize, refine, and assign the task to a developer. This phase includes all the discussions and decisions needed to start working on the change.
3. Development: Measure the duration from when development begins to when the code is ready for review. This phase includes coding, internal testing by the developer, and any necessary revisions.
4. Code review: Track the time from when the code is submitted for review to when it is approved and merged into the main branch. This phase can include multiple review cycles.
5. Testing: Measure the time taken for the code to pass through quality assurance (QA) testing, including any back-and-forth between developers and testers.
6. Deployment: Track the time from when the code is approved for deployment to when it is actually deployed in the production environment.

Breaking down LTFC into its component phases provides detailed insights into where the delays are occurring. This granularity allows your team to pinpoint inefficiencies and bottlenecks, making it easier to identify points of specific improvement or optimization.

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Simplified Measuring LTFC with DevStats

Manually measuring LTFC can be a complex and time-consuming task, often introducing unnecessary overhead; teams may struggle to consistently log each time point, and the accuracy of manually entered data can be questionable. This can lead to challenges such as missing data, subjective estimates, or errors in calculating total lead time, which make it difficult to gain a reliable picture of your development process.

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Using a specialized tool like [DevStats](https://www.devstats.com/) to monitor your deployment cycles can simplify this process. DevStats offers a detailed lead time report that provides accurate and actionable insights into each phase of your software-delivery cycle, displaying information to the detail in a granular and convenient manner.

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You get a comprehensive view of your entire software-delivery process in just a few steps—create an account, connect your repository, and add your development team. It's also worth noting that you can start using the free version of DevStats without a credit card.

Once you connect your repository, you can run a benchmark and your LTFC will be displayed in a gauge that ranges from "Needs focus" to "Elite".

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To complement this, DevStats also offers a complete LTFC report that will provide you with details for each committed task, the time it took to be completed, its date, and the assignee of that task.

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Conclusion

In this article, you've explored the significance of measuring LTFC in the software development process. You learned how LTFC can help you understand the efficiency and speed of your team's workflow and the potential pitfalls of not tracking this metric. Measuring LTFC allows for more informed decision-making, enabling your team to optimize their processes, reduce wasted efforts, and enhance both team morale and user satisfaction.

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DevStats is a powerful tool that simplifies and enhances the process of tracking LTFC. With its detailed lead time reports and user-friendly interface, DevStats empowers development teams to accurately measure and improve their lead times, driving better performance and ensuring timely, high-quality deployments. By embracing LTFC and utilizing tools like DevStats, your team can achieve greater agility, efficiency, and success in delivering exceptional software.