Lead/Cycle Time and Workflow
This report shows several metrics related to workflow efficiency that help you understand whether tickets and pull requests are flowing smoothly through the development process or getting stuck along the way.
Lead time for changes is one of the four DORA metrics. This report shows both ticket lead time (TLT) and pull request lead time (PRLT) so that you can assess lead time at both a ticket and PR level.
Because lead time counts time from task creation to completion, the report further shows ticket cycle time (TCT), which may be a more useful metric for tickets because it only begins when tickets start and doesn’t include time spent on the backlog.
One of the problems with lead time and cycle time metrics on their own is that they don’t tell you directly how to get better.
A more actionable workflow metric is work in progres (WIP) – a classic lean process efficiency metrics. This report shows WIP at the top by team and person. The nice thing about WIP is that it’s clear whether there is room for improvement because an optimal value is just over 1, while numbers above 2-3 indicate a significant amount of workflow inefficiency and context switching.
Next, this report also shows a breakdown of ticket cycle time (TCT) and pull request lead time (PRLT) by ticket status and stage (i.e., pre-open, waiting for review, review to merge, merge to deploy) so you can see where things are getting stuck.
The report also includes scorecard metrics for flow efficiency (FE), which measures the percentage of time from start to finish for tickets with active development work, in-progress status rate (IPSR), which looks at whether tickets are correctly set to in progress when they have active development work, and non-stale ticket rate (NSTR), which measures the portion of in-progress development tickets that have had development activity in the past week.
Finally, the report shows individual long lead time pull requests (LLTPR) and long cycle time tickets (LCTT) that took more than four weeks so that you diagnose the root cause of workflow inefficiencies.
