What are the most effective ways to measure software development speed using lead time?

1 What is lead time?

Lead time is a metric that tracks the duration of a work item from the start to the finish of its lifecycle. For example, if a customer requests a new feature, the lead time is the time it takes to analyze, design, develop, test, and deploy that feature to the customer. Lead time reflects the efficiency and effectiveness of the software development process, as well as the customer satisfaction and value delivery. A shorter lead time means faster feedback, lower costs, and higher quality.

2 Why is lead time important?

Lead time is important because it helps you measure and improve your software development speed, which is crucial for achieving competitive advantage and meeting customer expectations. By measuring lead time, you can identify and eliminate waste, bottlenecks, and delays in your workflow, and optimize your resources, processes, and practices. You can also use lead time to set realistic and achievable goals, monitor progress, and communicate expectations to your stakeholders. A lower lead time indicates a higher speed and agility of your software development team.

4 How to improve lead time?

In order to reduce lead time, it's important to identify and address the root causes of waste, inefficiency, and variability in your software development process. Agile and lean principles, such as Scrum, Kanban, or DevOps, can help you focus on delivering value to customers in small increments and eliminate non-value-added activities. The theory of constraints is another management approach that seeks to identify and remove the most limiting factor or bottleneck in a system. Additionally, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are software development practices that automate and streamline the building, testing, and deploying of software products. Finally, value stream mapping is a visual tool that maps the flow of value from customer request to customer delivery and highlights sources of waste, delay, and inefficiency.

5 How to monitor lead time?

To monitor lead time, you need to establish a baseline, set a target, and measure the performance and improvement over time. Using various indicators and metrics, such as lead time distribution, percentiles, and trend, can help you identify outliers, compare performance, benchmark improvement, evaluate speed, and forecast agility. By measuring and improving lead time, you can increase your software development speed and deliver value to your customers more quickly and effectively.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?