Lead time for changes in Jira
Jira Cloud, work items and releases.
Lead time for changes, which DORA now calls change lead time, is how long a change takes from work started to running in production. This page says what Jira shows for it by itself, then how Changeline works it out from a work item’s history and its release.
What Jira does by itself
A Jira Software board’s Control chart, under its Reports, shows how long work items that reached Done took, measured on the board’s columns. Jira’s Cycle time report measures from the first commit to a deployment, and so needs a connected CI/CD tool.
By hand, a filter such as resolved >= -90d exports each work item’s created and
resolved dates, and a spreadsheet subtracts them and takes the median. That
measures creation to Done, which includes the days a work item sat in the backlog,
and Done is not a release. A work item’s first move out of To Do is in its
history, which a filter does not export.
What Changeline does
Changeline is our app. For each work item deployed in the period it takes the start, the first time the work item moved out of a To Do status (a work item never seen leaving To Do starts at its creation), and the deployment, its first released version on or after its start, at the end of that day. The figure is the median, such as 4.5 days, with of 120 work items under it and a lozenge for better or worse than the days before.
DORA starts the clock at the commit. Jira gives an app no commit times, so Changeline starts it when work starts. A Jira Automation rule, “Branch created → move to In Progress” (GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket for Jira), makes the two the same.
Under the five figures, Where the lead time goes splits the period’s lead time into Waiting to start, In progress and Waiting for release, each a median, and names the largest, so you see whether the time goes to the queue, the work or the release. The Releases tab shows each release’s median lead time, its three stages and its work items. A work item whose release is before its start is left out and counted in a grey line. A Jira admin can start every work item at its creation instead. In Done mode, a work item ends at its own Done. Changeline only reads Jira and changes nothing in it.
See The five measures and Change failure rate in Jira. Back to Changeline.
DORA here is the research programme at Google behind change lead time and four other measures, not the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act. DORA is a trademark of Google LLC, and Changeline is not made or endorsed by Google.
