Unlock Faster Delivery: Master Agile Lead Time

Elite software teams deliver code 127 times faster than their peers, according to the 2024 DORA Report. However, each team has its own nuances and context. As highlighted by the DORA report, trying to achieve elite improvement is more important. Understanding and optimizing Agile Lead Time can help your team achieve — without compromising on quality or team wellbeing.

In this guide, we'll break down what Lead Time means for development teams, its role in your agile processes, and practical ways to measure and improve it. You'll learn proven strategies that help agile teams deliver value faster while maintaining sustainable practices.

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Lead time in Agile is a key metric that measures the total time from when a work item is first ideated and documented to when it is delivered to the customer. It encompasses the entire process, including waiting periods, development, testing, and deployment.

This metric provides insights into the efficiency of your development pipeline and the overall responsiveness of your team to customer needs.

Lead Time vs Change Lead Time

While lead time gives us the big picture, Change Lead Time (one of the four DORA metrics) helps us focus on a specific part of the process. It measures the time between a developer's first code commit and when that code is successfully running in production.

At Multitudes, we've found that Change Lead Time is particularly valuable for engineering teams because its specific focus on software delivery. In contrast, Lead Time captures a wider window -- including time spent in backlog, design, etc.

Lead Time vs Cycle Time

Lead Time measures the total elapsed time from to idea to delivery, including backlog time, while Cycle Time measures active work time only.

Both metrics provide valuable insights for agile teams - Lead Time helps optimize the entire delivery process and customer experience, while Cycle Time helps teams improve their internal efficiency once work begins.

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Tracking lead time can make a meaningful difference to your team's performance. Here are five key reasons that demonstrate its value:

1. Visibility into development flow: Lead Time shows how efficiently your team converts ideas into  software that customers can use. It serves as an indicator of your development pipeline's health, tracking its components can highlight where work moves smoothly and where it tends to get stuck.
2. Identifies improvement opportunities: By tracking Lead Time components, you can pinpoint specific stages where delays occur in your process. Whether it's lengthy code reviews or slow deployment processes, understanding these bottlenecks is the first step to making targeted improvements.
3. More accurate planning: Understanding your team's Lead Time helps create more precise project timelines. With real data informing your estimates and resource planning, teams can set more realistic expectations for delivery.
4. Indicates team and process health: Lead time reflects your team's overall performance. Consistently short Lead Times often signal well-functioning processes, while increasing Lead Times may suggest areas needing attention.
5. Correlation with customer satisfaction: Getting features and fixes to users efficiently matters in today's market. Shorter Lead Times mean faster response to user needs, which often leads to better user retention and customer satisfaction.

Lead Time and Flow Framework

Lead Time is an indicator of Flow, reflecting the speed at which value moves through a system from inception to delivery. The Flow Framework, introduced by Dr. Mik Kersten in 2018, provides a comprehensive approach to understanding and optimizing this flow.

The Flow Framework categorizes work into four types of Flow items:

• Features: New value-adding functionalities or enhancements.
• Defects: Fixes for quality issues impacting customer experience.
• Debts: Improvements to software or operational architecture.
• Risks: Work addressing security, privacy, or compliance concerns.

To measure how these items flow through the development process, the framework introduces five key metrics:

• Flow Velocity: The number of Flow Items completed over a specific time period.
• Flow Time: The time taken for Flow Items to go from 'work start' to 'work complete'. Lead Time is closely related to Flow Time, as it measures the entire process from request to delivery.
• Flow Efficiency: Compares active time versus wait time, helping identify areas where Lead Time can be improved by reducing wait states.
• Flow Load: Measures the number of Flow items in progress, which can significantly impact Lead Time.
• Flow Distribution: Examines the balance of different types of Flow items being worked on.

Applying the Flow Framework can help teams not only improve their Lead Time but also enhance their overall ability to deliver value efficiently. This approach aligns closely with Value Stream Management practices, offering a holistic view of the software development lifecycle and its impact on business outcomes.

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Calculating Lead Time requires data from your issue-tracking and deployment tools, but the process is straightforward:

1. Identify the key timestamps for your work items
2. Track the duration between initial request and final deployment
3. Calculate Lead Time using the formula:Lead Time = Time in backlog + Cycle Time

Accurate lead time measurements depend on teams clearly defining when work is requested and when it's considered delivered to users.

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Reducing Lead Time is about finding the right balance between speed and quality in software delivery. There are three primary areas to focus on to effectively reduce Lead Time:

Streamline your backlog and prioritization

Making it easy for the team to see what needs doing next by regularly tidying up or 'grooming' and prioritizing your backlog. Ensuring things like feature requirements are clear and breaking down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces helps developers hit the ground running.

Keeping a Handle on Work in Progress (WIP)

Don't juggle too many things at once -- implementing things such as WIP limits can  reduce the amount of work-items that are 'nearly done'. They can also help identify bottlenecks in delivery.

Automate where possible:

Automation can support teams to eliminate manual tasks and standardize processes. Examples of automations your team can implement include:

• Automate Builds: Setup CI/CD pipelines that trigger on code commits. Using CI/CD your team can reduce building, testing and deployment of code.
• Test Automation: Including comprehensive unit tests, integration tests and end-to-end tests as part of your build process can reduce your lead time too. According to the 2024 DORA Report, teams with high levels of test automation have a shorter Change Lead Time  (which is a subset of overall lead time).

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As the saying goes, ‘What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t gets improved.’

Multitudes offers tools that can help you track and enhance your team's lead time. By integrating with your existing development tools, such as GitHub, JIRA and more, Multitudes provides real-time insights into your delivery pipeline, specifically focusing on Change Lead Time.

With Multitudes, you can:

• Automatically track Change Lead Time to measure how long it takes from first commit to successful deployment
• Gain visibility into work patterns and types of work, such as feature development vs. bug fixing, to understand where delays might occur
• Identify collaboration patterns and potential silos within your team, which can affect Lead Time

By leveraging Multitudes, teams can spend more time acting on insights to improve their Lead Time, thereby boosting overall efficiency and satisfaction.

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