DORA Metrics
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      3. DORA Metrics

      Lead Time for Changes

      How does Uplevel define Lead Time for Changes?

      The DORA metric Lead Time for Changes is measured as the median duration of time from first commit until the Pull Request is deployed to a production environment using CI/CD Data. This differs from Cycle Time which looks at when a PR is merged. There are 4 distinct phases for PRs

      First Commit to PR:

      The First Commit to PR phase looks at how long the particular PR was in development. In order to capture this, Uplevel is looking at the time period from the first commit to when the PR is submitted for review. If a PR is opened immediately after the first commit, your First Commit to PR time will be shown as 0 hours. If a PR is opened as a draft or work in progress, then this phase will end when it is converted to be ready for review.

      Wait:

      The Waiting phase looks at how long a PR is waiting for a review. It captures the time from when the PR is opened (or converted from a draft) to the first action (e.g., commenting, request for changes, approval) from a reviewer. Keep an eye out for this section — it's common to see bottlenecks here.

      Review:

      Review captures the time from the first review action from a reviewer to the time the PR is merged. If there is a lot of back and forth, this phase could be longer and might be an area to look into.

      Deploy:

      Deployments to production are estimated for each repository by the environments configured within Github Actions. Uplevel uses an organization wide regular expression (Regex) to find for production environments, but exclude non-production environments, but can also configure specific repositories. Your organization's global definition is visible by visiting the configuration page, and clicking on an environment. Learn more about how to utilize this page here.

      What is the difference between Lead Time for Changes, PR Cycle Time and Epic Lead Time?

      Each of these three metrics gives different lenses into the development process:

      Lead Time for Changes is the fullest picture how quickly code changes are delivered to users. Look to the Deploy phase to look for bottlenecks that are happening after code is initially merged.

      PR Cycle Time - For a holistic look at how code changes are merged regardless of CI/CD usage, look to PR Cycle Time to get visibility into the velocity of all PRs.

      Epic Lead Time - While Epic Lead Time may be similar in name to Lead Time for Changes, this metric looks at how long it takes to plan, develop and close Epics. Because Epics represent larger bodies of work, the time scale for Epic Lead Time may be on the order of several weeks to more than a quarter depending on the planning process.