Lead Time for Changes
Median time from creation of the application package to the first deployment of that package to the production environment.
Metric Levels
| Level | Threshold |
|---|---|
| ELITE | Less than one day |
| HIGH | Between one day and one week |
| MEDIUM | Between one week and one month |
| LOW | More than one month |
| BLANK | Not enough data to compute |
Metric Trends
| Trend | Meaning |
|---|---|
| INCREASING | The metric level has been improving in the last month |
| STABLE | The metric level has been stable in the last month |
| DECREASING | The metric level has been deteriorating in the last month |
Example
A developer merges a bug fix at 9:00 AM. The CI pipeline builds and tests the package in 20 minutes, producing version 2.4.1. The package passes a short smoke test in staging and is deployed to production by 10:30 AM — less than two hours after the package was created. CodeNOW records this lead time and, across all deployments, the median comes out to under one hour. This evaluates as ELITE.
This result is typical of teams with fully automated pipelines, no manual approval gates for routine changes, and a staging environment that closely mirrors production.