lead time for change
also: LTFC, deployment lead time, time to production
Lead time for change (LTFC) is the measured time between when a code change is committed and when it is successfully deployed to production, reflecting deployment efficiency and CI/CD maturity.
Lead time for change is a key DevOps metric that quantifies how quickly your organization can move code from development into production. It measures the elapsed time from the moment a developer commits code to version control until that code is running in the production environment serving real users.
A shorter lead time indicates a more efficient deployment pipeline with automated testing, building, and release processes. For example, if a developer commits a bug fix at 9am and it's live in production by 10am, the LTFC is one hour. Organizations with mature CI/CD pipelines often achieve LTFC in minutes, while teams with manual processes may measure it in days or weeks.
LTFC is closely tracked alongside deployment frequency and mean time to recovery (MTTR) to assess overall software delivery performance. It's calculated by tools that integrate with Git and deployment systems to automatically timestamp commits and production releases.