2 posts tagged with "lead-time"

Roughly 80% of the engineering teams I've reviewed in the last year report a "Lead Time" number that DORA wouldn't recognize. They measure ticket-creation-to-release. DORA measures something narrower and harder to game: first commit to production. The gap between those two definitions is often 5–10 days, and it's the difference between an honest delivery metric and a dashboard that flatters the wrong people.

This guide pins down the strict DORA definition, gives you the formula, separates Lead Time from Cycle Time (they're not synonyms), and shows the 2026 elite/high/medium/low bands you can benchmark against.

Stripe's 2018 "Developer Coefficient" study estimated that $300 billion is lost globally each year to developer inefficiency. A large share of that waste hides inside a single metric: Lead Time. A Lead Time of 5 days tells you nothing. Is it 4 days of coding and 1 day of review? Or 1 day of coding and 4 days waiting for someone to open your merge request? The fix for each scenario is completely different — and if you're treating Lead Time as a single number, you're solving the wrong problem.