Cycle Time

Cycle time is a metric that measures process speed. It’s the speed of your development time, how fast you can deliver a feature to the customer, from the moment work has started to the moment it’s been delivered.

The cycle time metric is an indicator of your organization’s development velocity. It’s all about the speed and quality of the execution. A cycle time analysis lets you connect the dots between your KPIs and optimize your production process in order to stand out from the competition.

A cycle time analysis gives you a clear picture of what’s working in your development pipeline. When done right, it can indicate how efficient your software development team is, while also letting you:

• identify bottlenecks and proactively resolve them
• ensure your teams ship faster
• enable your developers to build better code.

We’ve broken down the cycle time metric into the four stages of the software development process:

1. CODING: Time to Open – The activities that take place before a Pull Request (PR) is opened have a higher impact on cycle time than those that take place after. That’s why optimizations at this stage have the greatest impact on overall cycle time.
2. PICKUP: Time to First Review – This stage deals with the first bottleneck in your PR workflow. Time to First Review is often overlooked because it doesn’t represent individual work, nor does it reflect the efficiency of a Code Review process. Instead, it represents the effectiveness of the first handoff in your PR workflow.
3. REVIEW: Time to Approve – Code Reviews are best suited for improving code maintainability and increasing shared understanding throughout the team. That doesn’t mean they can’t be improved upon themselves.
4. DEPLOY: Time to Deploy – At this stage, you’re deploying working software continuously to users to mitigate risks, respond to change quickly, and get the best version of your product into the hands of customers.