What is Issue Cycle Time?

Owned by YoungIn Attucks
Apr 26, 2023
4 min read

Issue Cycle time measures the time when a card goes into a ‘in progress’ state to completion. Also based on items assigned to people within your team settings.

 

Why should I measure Issue Cycle Time?

 

This metric can help you understand if items are piling up or aging out in your process. 

To better track issue cycle times, recommendations are to break down your actions into cards that can be completed in a day (e.g. subtasks, stories, etc) and use story points to estimate work (e.g. Fibonacci Estimation).

Once you identify a baseline for your team, you’ll want to monitor if the average cycle time is growing or shrinking.

Shrinking cycle time means a higher throughput and issues are being completed more quickly, while growing cycle time can indicate that an issue is being worked on for longer than usual. Upward and downward spikes in this data can signal a problem with the pipeline.

 

What metric should I use in Allstacks?

 

We recommend starting with the ‘Cycle Time’ metric.

Under: Metrics > Process Health > Cycle Time

 

 

How It's Generated

We generate this data by taking each issue that is not marked as closed in all services that provide issue tracking [ex.Jira, ADO], and record the average time that each issue is in progress. The chart defaults to average but we recommend aggregating the data by median in case of skewed data distribution by outliers.

 

General Filters

 

Use these filters to narrow down the information you want to see. After making any updates, make sure you click ‘update’ to have the changes reflect on the chart below.

 

  • Issues Closed Between: For Issue Cycle Time, we recommend using monthly or greater. To visualize change over time, use at minimum, the quarterly date range. 

 

  • Descendants of: Limit the data by JIRA or ADO projects. You can also filter by project or repo. 

 

  • Issues Assigned to: You can narrow down your search by tag labels as well as specific individuals.

 

  • Advanced Filters: Filter your data using fields and properties located in your project management tool (e.g. JIRA, ADO). Make sure to remove ‘Inactive’ or ‘Removed’ issue states.

 

TIP: Make sure to apply the changes you made to General Filters by clicking ‘Update’.

Chart Settings

You can use chart settings to format how the chart displays your data.  This is powerful when it comes to creating data visualizations to support the story you’re trying to tell.

 

Commonly Asked Questions regarding Issue Cycle Time:

 

Q: What is our Issue Cycle Time on a month by month basis? Quarter over quarter?

 

Cycle Time grouped by month:

 

Cycle Time grouped by Quarter:

 

 

Q. How to measure Cycle Time by Issue Type?

 

Q. How to measure Cycle Time by Story Points?

 

Q: How do we track cycle times for parent cards?

  • Under Chart Settings > Filtered to: > select ‘Include All Item Types’. 

This will allow parent cards to display in the chart (see Epic and Feature in legend).