Delivery Lead Time
The elapsed time from code commit to production deployment
Definition: Cycle time + Deploy time (CI/CD pipeline execution)
Delivery Lead Time (also called Lead Time for Changes) measures how quickly code moves from development to production. It answers: "How long does it take a change to reach users from the moment the commit is made?"
A shorter lead time indicates faster delivery and faster feedback loops; a longer lead time suggests either slower development cycles or slower deployment pipelines.
The Two Components
Change is committed to the repository
Time from commit through pull request review and merge to main/release branch
Time spent in CI/CD pipeline (tests, builds, validations, staging, production deployment)
Code successfully deployed to production
Lead Time = Cycle Time + Deploy Time
How Data Is Collected
Hivel calculates Delivery Lead Time by connecting to your CI/CD platform and repository through the Deployment API:
Retrieves commit timestamps from your repository
Identifies when commits were merged to the release branch (cycle time)
Captures CI/CD pipeline start and completion times (deploy time)
Calculates the total elapsed time from commit to production deployment
Aggregates metrics across all deployments
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