Lead Time vs Cycle Time vs Change Lead Time: All you need to know

Did you know that Google found that high performing organizations have a Change Lead Time of less than a week? In software development, there are 3 commonly confused metrics which are useful for optimizing your team's efficiency: Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Change Lead Time(this last one being a DORA metric).  But what's the difference, and why should you care?

Let's dive into Lead Time vs Cycle Time vs Change Lead Time, and how you can use them to improve your team's productivity.

Sections:

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Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Change Lead Time all intend to measure how quickly engineering teams deliver value to stakeholders — whether internal (e.g., other dev teams, company leaders) or external (e.g., customers).

Let’s first define them:

1. Lead Time: Measures entire lifecycle from documented idea to delivery — from the moment an item is added to the backlog to when it is delivered.
2. Cycle Time: Measures active development time — from the moment development starts on an item to it being delivered to the end user.
3. Change Lead Time: Measures from the moment of the first commit to when it is delivered. This is one of the four key DORA metrics and what DORA considers the most predictable part of the development lifecycle.

Think of Lead Time, Cycle Time, Change Lead Time as the vital signs of your development process. Just as a doctor monitors heart rate and blood pressure to assess overall health, engineering managers use these metrics to gauge the efficiency of their development workflows.

Now let's dive deeper into these three:

Lead Time

Lead Time gives you a comprehensive view of your whole development process, including time waiting in backlog. It measures the entire journey of a feature request, from conception to delivery.

Lead time captures:

1. Time spent in the backlog
2. Time in development before first commit (e.g., environment set-up, clarifying requirements)
3. Time after first commit (e.g., active coding time)
4. Time in review and editing
5. Time to deploy

For external stakeholders like customers, lead time is often the most visible metric, as it represents the total time they wait for a feature or fix.

Cycle Time

Cycle Time refers to the active work phase of your development process. It measures the time spent actually building and refining the feature (excluding the time in backlog as features are prioritized).

Cycle Time typically includes:

1. Time in development before first commit (e.g., environment set-up, clarifying requirements)
2. Time after first commit (e.g., active coding time)
3. Time in review and editing
4. Time to deploy

This metric is particularly useful for understanding your team's efficiency once they start working on a task.

Change Lead Time

Change Lead Time refers to the time after the first commit, which involves the active coding, review, and editing cycle:

1. Time after first commit (e.g., active coding time)
2. Time in review and editing
3. Time to deploy

This metric is most useful for understanding coding productivity specifically.

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The key difference between Lead Time vs Cycle Time is that Lead Time includes the time in backlog:

Lead Time = Time in backlog + Cycle Time

Subsequently, the key difference between Cycle Time vs Change Lead Time is the Time before the First Commit:

Cycle Time = Time before first commit + Change Lead Time

To illustrate with an example:

• A customer asks for a feature on Monday and someone makes a ticket for it (Lead Time starts)
• It sits in the backlog until Tuesday, when the team did their cycle planning and decided to pick up this ticket to build
• Development starts on Wednesday. This involved further understanding the requirements and related documentation before starting to code (Cycle Time starts)
• The first commit is made on Thursday (Change Lead Time starts)
• Development, review, and deployment are completed by Friday

In this scenario:

• Lead Time = 5 days (Monday to Friday)
• Cycle Time = 3 days (Wednesday to Friday)
• Change Lead Time = 2 days (Thursday to Friday)

Customer Perspective vs. Engineering team perspective

All 3 metrics offer different insights and perspectives into your development process, each valuable in its own right.

Lead Time reflects the customer's perspective. It reflects how quickly your team meets customer demand – where the customer could be an internal or an external stakeholder who's asked for something. This metric can be useful for setting realistic customer expectations and directly impacts satisfaction.

Cycle Time reflects internal processes. It measures the time actually working on a task, from the moment work begins to when it's complete. This metric is key for optimizing development efficiency and streamlining your workflow.

Change Lead Time also reflects internal processes, and laser focuses on development productivity after the first commit. It is just as important as Lead Time and Cycle Time, if not arguably more. Change Lead Time is one of the DORA Metrics by Google and measures one of the most predictable parts of the software development pipeline — because the Engineering team has full control over the measured process. It has the most evidence-backed research showing links to better organizational performance.

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Here is a table summarizing the key differences of Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Change Lead Time

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Measuring Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Change Lead Time help optimize your software development process and business outcomes.  Let's explore the key benefits these metrics bring to your organization.

Enhancing Developer Productivity

Insights from these metrics illuminate your development workflow which, with the right initiatives, can lead to improving internal ways of working for higher efficiency.

Key benefits include:

• Identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in the development process
• Optimizing workflows by improving team collaboration and communication
• Setting realistic expectations for project timelines with external stakeholders

Increasing Customer Value and Financial Performance

The benefits can extend beyond your development team, directly impacting your customers and your market position. Companies that excel in Change Lead Time and the other DORA metrics (according to Broadcom) are 2X more likely to exceed their business goals, demonstrating how these metrics drive both operational excellence and financial success.

The drivers of accelerated value creation include:

• Faster time-to-market for new features
• Better alignment between customer needs and software development
• Efficient usage of engineering teams’ time

Driving Data-Informed Decision Making

By consistently tracking Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Change Lead Time, you create a data-rich environment that supports informed decision-making across your organization. Of the 3, we recommend including Change Lead Time as a key metric given the supporting-evidence from DORA on its correlation with business outcomes as outlined in Accelerate.

This leads to:

• More accurate project planning and resource allocation
• Ability to quantify the impact of process changes
• Data-backed justification for investments in tools or training

Remember, these metrics are not just numbers on a dashboard. They're powerful tools that, when used effectively, can transform your development process, delight your customers, and drive your business forward.

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While tracking Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Change Lead Time can provide valuable insights, it's important to understand that these metrics alone don't tell the whole story. There are 2 common challenges faced by engineering leaders:

• Over-optimization: Focusing too heavily on improving metrics can lead to unintended consequences, such as sacrificing code quality for speed. It can also lead to the team gaming the metric, leading to unintended consequences. It’s Goodhart’s Law in action: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
• Context and complexity: Not all tasks are created equal. Treating all work items the same when measuring Lead Time and Cycle Time can lead to misleading conclusions. Sometimes client demands grow, and inflating both Lead Time and Cycle Time without being directly captured by the metrics.

While there's no one-size-fits-all solution, here are some strategies we’ve seen work for many teams:

• Adopt a balanced scorecard approach: Consider multiple metrics together (e.g., Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Code Quality measures) to get a more holistic view of performance. Ideally, our set of metrics includes some that are in tension so we can see the trade-offs our teams might be making. For example, consider speed vs quality, or volume of work vs wellbeing. The SPACE framework offers a great approach of selecting these metrics that are “in-tension”.
• Contextualize your data: Looking at data alone can overlook important aspects like the human context and overall impact. Metrics without proper context can be misleading, so always interpret them within the broader perspective. We recommend using the data as a starting point for conversations: the data can show interesting points for discussion, but we we need to talk to the people on our teams to get the full picture. To help with this, Multitudes has an annotations feature to keep the context next to the data.
• Focus on team-level metrics: We recommend emphasizing team-level metrics to encourage collaboration and shared responsibility. The reality is that the best software is built by cohesive, high-performing teams. PRs are a team sport.

Ultimately, the key is to use these metrics as a starting point for discussions and continuous improvement. Always keeping your specific team dynamics and business goals in mind.

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Looking to measure and improve your Lead Time and Cycle Time? Our engineering insights platform is designed to help you track these crucial metrics and much more.

With Multitudes, you can:

• Automatically track Change Lead Time and Cycle Time across your projects
• Get visibility into work patterns and bottlenecks that might be inflating your times
• Identify collaboration patterns and potential silos within your team that could be slowing things down
• Understand individual and team well-being through metrics like out-of-hours work
• Receive timely nudges via Slack about blocked work and who might need more support, helping you address issues before they significantly impact your Lead and Cycle Times

By leveraging Multitudes, your team can spend less time manually tracking metrics and more time acting on insights to improve productivity and satisfaction. Our customers have seen improvements of up to 25% in their Lead and Cycle Times while maintaining code quality and team wellbeing.

Ready to unlock happier, higher-performing teams?

Try our product today!