The Lead time for changes graph displays, as its name implies, the time it takes to deploy a commit to production. It measures the time it takes for a merged code review to be integrated (between its first commit and its deployment). This can be patches, enhancements or new features.
As part of the DORA metrics (link to the official page), this measure, along with the Deployment Frequency, allows measuring a development team's velocity.
You can view this data by day, week, or month depending on your preference. Depending on the settings of your project board (linked to the Process Axis), the display by sprint option may also be available. Please note that the display of the last six months or the last year does not allow the display by day.
Note that you must configure one (or more) webhooks to synchronize the data needed to measure this data.
Example of use
For the following graph, the displayed period is the last three months, and the display mode is by week. Overall, we can see that the team takes, on average, 2 days and 5 hours to deploy a commit to production. It is also possible to select the environment data to be displayed from the dropdown menu located in the upper right corner of the graph.
The graph also shows the time required to complete each step in the process. In this team's case, we can see that the bottleneck is at the deployment stage.
When calculating the metric, Axify only considers deployments that occur when a pull request is merged. Therefore, if a deployment occurs during the "pickup" or "review" phase of a pull request, the deployment is ignored for this metric. However, Axify will consider this deployment in calculating the deployment frequency.
A short lead time for changes demonstrates that your processes are efficient and quickly deliver value to your customers, allowing you to get quick feedback on your product. In the case of the team used in this example, the bottleneck at the deployment stage should be addressed quickly, as it prevents the delivery of value to the customers.
Axify identifies and measures deployments as follows:
- Only successful deployments are counted.
- We target deployments per day.
- Only one deployment is considered in case of a deployment that fails and is redeployed later (after rollback).
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All deployments are considered for the selected environment.
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Deployment data can come from several sources on the same webhook or on several webhooks.
To learn more about the variation indicator and its calculation, check out this article!