Lead Time

DEFINITION

Lead time is the average time it takes for your engineering organization to deliver a pull request into production.

HOW IT'S MEASURED

Lead time is calculated as the time elapsed from when a pull request is started (first commit is made on a branch) to when it is complete (merged to a development branch).

If you connect Jira or set up deployment tracking for your organization, you can extend the visibility you have into lead time.

Industry benchmarks exclude the Deploy phase because of the differences in workflows across teams.