From Commit to Production: How to Speed Up Lead Time for Changes
If you've ever fixed a bug or built a new feature, only to watch your code sit in limbo for days or even weeks before reaching users, you’ve experienced a slow Lead Time for Changes firsthand.
Lead Time for Changes (LTC) is a measure of how quickly your team can move code from development to production. A short LTC means your team can deliver features and fixes faster. A long LTC means delays, frustration, and missed opportunities.
The goal is clear: shorten Lead Time for Changes without sacrificing quality. So let’s understand what LTC is, why it matters, and how you can improve it using DevOps techniques.
DevOps techniques can guide your team forward, so that everyone is working in the same direction.
What is Lead Time for Changes?
Lead Time for Changes measures the time it takes for a committed code change to be deployed in production. Think of it as the journey from “I’ve written the code” to “users can see the change.”
LTC includes:
Development time – Writing and testing the code
Code review and approval time – Waiting for feedback and merging changes
Deployment time – Getting the change into production
In an ideal workflow, these steps happen quickly and smoothly. But in reality, teams often run into bottlenecks that slow everything down.
Why Lead Time for Changes Matters
A slow LTC affects everyone:
For developers, long wait times mean context-switching and frustration. You might be fixing a bug today, but by the time it’s deployed, you’ve already moved on to something else.
For customers and users, delays mean slower access to new features and fixes.
For businesses, slow changes make it harder to respond to market demands and customer feedback.
On the other hand, a short LTC means:
✅ Faster bug fixes and security patches
✅ More frequent feature updates
✅ Higher team morale and productivity
Simply put, reducing LTC helps your team move faster and deliver better software.
How to Improve Lead Time for Changes
Shortening LTC requires optimizing each step in the software delivery process. That means both using the right tools and techniques, and also making LTC a point of emphasis within your team’s culture and best practices. Here’s how:
1. Automate Your Build and Deployment Pipeline
One of the biggest contributors to long LTC is manual processes—manual testing, manual approvals, and manual deployments. Action steps:
Use Continuous Integration (CI) tools like GitHub Actions to automate code testing and validation.
Implement Continuous Deployment (CD) so that approved changes are pushed to production automatically. Check out our guide to putting CD into action for your team.
Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Ansible to ensure environments are consistent and deployable on demand.
💡 Goal: Every commit should be automatically tested and ready for deployment within minutes, not days.
2. Break Down Large Changes into Smaller, Deployable Units
The bigger the change, the longer it takes to review, test, and deploy. Large updates introduce complexity, which slows everything down. Action steps:
Follow trunk-based development, where developers merge small changes frequently rather than working on long-lived feature branches.
Use feature flags to roll out changes gradually instead of bundling everything into one big release.
Keep pull requests small—ideally under 400 lines of code—to make reviews quicker and more effective.
💡 Goal: Small, frequent changes are easier to test, review, and deploy, reducing LTC dramatically.
3. Optimize Code Reviews
Code reviews are a crucial quality checkpoint, but if they take too long, they can become a bottleneck. Action steps:
Set a time expectation for reviews—for example, reviews should be completed within 24 hours.
Use automated linting and static analysis tools to catch basic issues before human reviewers look at the code.
Encourage pair programming or peer review rotations to ensure that no single developer is a bottleneck.
💡 Goal: Code reviews should be fast, thorough, and not block deployments unnecessarily. Read our recommendations on how to make your code reviews fast and efficient for your team.
4. Improve Testing Strategies
Slow or unreliable tests can extend LTC unnecessarily. If a test suite takes hours to run, your entire deployment slows down. Action steps:
Run automated tests in parallel to speed up execution.
Use staging environments and canary deployments to test changes safely in production-like settings.
Shift left on testing—developers should write and run tests early, not just before deployment.
💡 Goal: Tests should be fast, reliable, and catch issues early, so they don’t delay deployments.
5. Streamline the Deployment Process
Even if code is ready, a slow deployment pipeline can stall progress. Action steps:
Adopt blue-green deployments to minimize downtime and risk.
Use canary releases to test changes on a small percentage of users before rolling them out fully.
Standardize deployment scripts to avoid manual interventions.
💡 Goal: Deployments should be quick, repeatable, and low-risk.
6. Measure, Analyze, and Improve
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Keep track of your team’s LTC over time and identify trends. Action steps:
Use DevOps dashboards to track LTC.
Conduct post-mortems on slow deployments to understand root causes.
Experiment with workflow changes and measure their impact.
💡 Goal: Make LTC a visible and trackable metric in your team’s workflow.
Final Thoughts
Lead Time for Changes is one of the most critical metrics for high-performing teams. A shorter LTC means faster features, happier developers, and better business outcomes.
By automating processes, keeping changes small, optimizing reviews, and improving deployments, your team can reduce LTC and ship code faster than ever.
Want to see how DevOps can help your team? Create a free account with our Caparra chatbot and ask it for advice on how to accelerate your development workflow. 🚀
