What is the Issue Cycle Time?

Companies use this cycle time insight to monitor the ongoing delivery performance over the selected reporting period. It allows product managers to detect unusual shifts in the average duration of each stage and address delivery problems or slowdowns with the right team (developers, product designers, QA etc.).

This cycle time insight is a superior approach to using a burn-down chart, as it highlights which stage of the development cycle is causing problems instead of just showing a sudden blockage in the delivery pipe.

This insight also allows teams to experiment with new development patterns and monitor the results. Creating per-team variations of this insight allows engineering managers to perform A/B testing on development practices, giving them hard cold facts about what works and what does not.

Leading software companies (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) track the cycle time of issues to optimize development processes and ensure efficient workflow management.

For clarity purposes, this insight is broken down into 3 stages:

• Pickup time is the total duration spent in the initial status (“To Do” or “Selected for Development” by default) before the development starts
• Coding time is the total duration spent in the development status (“In Progress” by default) 
• Testing time is the total duration spent in the test status ( "Staging", "UAT" or "QA" by default) 

The statuses for each stage can be customized to match your Jira/Trello workflow configuration. More stages can also be added to increase the cycle time granularity.

Key Benefits of the Monthly Average Time in Column for Jira and Trello

• Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoint stages in your workflow where delays frequently occur. This insight helps in addressing and mitigating bottlenecks, improving overall process efficiency.
• Improve Estimations: Enables better estimation of task durations, leading to more accurate project timelines and resource allocation, enhancing your team's planning and forecasting capabilities.
• Measure Performance: Evaluating team performance and productivity. By setting benchmarks and analyzing trends over time, you can identify high-performing areas and those requiring improvement, ultimately boosting team efficiency and output.
• Ensure Transparency: Fosters transparency within the team and with stakeholders by providing a clear picture of progress and potential delays, facilitating better communication and collaboration
• Optimize Workflows: Refine and streamline workflows based on data-driven decisions to reassign tasks, adjust priorities, and implement process improvements, leading to more efficient operations.

How to Improve on this Metric?

Pickup Time is High

• Locate bottlenecks in engineers’ plannings
  • Use the Value Stream Management dashboard to understand your engineering habits and patterns and optimize your resources allocation, and added-value
  • Use the Sprint overview dashboard to assess your engineering team’s planning and activity.
• Avoid issue “hoarding”: Only add issues to the development tasks that you know your team can deliver.

Coding Time is High

• Reduce the size of issues/user stories to streamline the development tasks. 
• Locate bottlenecks in engineers’ plannings
  • Use the Value Stream Management dashboard to understand your engineering habits and patterns and optimize your resources allocation, and added-value
  • Use the Sprint overview dashboard to assess your engineering team’s planning and activity.
• Ensure the scope of tasks is clear as missing or vague specifications often lead to back-and-forths and longer development times.

Testing Time is High

• Reduce the size of issues to streamline the reviews. Bigger items are less likely to be picked up for testing and are more difficult to review.
• Give engineers some dedicated time to perform their review on a daily or weekly basis.
• Empower senior engineers to make junior reviewers grow into making relevant and rigorous reviews (which eventually leads to fewer reviews).

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