Deciding the number of story points or task durations is always challenging during planning meetings. This often leads to changing release dates mid-way through the development, which is not a good practice.
This is where measuring cycle time in software development becomes crucial. It gives a quantitative measurement that can be used to evaluate and identify key factors such as team efficiency, quickness, and bottlenecks in the process.
What Is Cycle Time?
Cycle time is an Agile metric that measures the time it takes to complete a single task from start to end. To accomplish this precisely, it is crucial to determine the starting and ending points of the cycle time.
The cycle time or feature cycle time starts when the task moves to the active development stage and ends when the task is deployed into production.
How Do You Measure Cycle Time?
The cycle time measuring process is a relatively simple process:
- Set the start and end points for the tasks.
- Track the time it takes for each item to move from start to end.
- Calculate cycle time by calculating the gap between two times.
If you want more insight, you can break the cycle time into phases and calculate the cycle time separately in each phase.
- Coding time: The duration from when the developer writes the first piece of code of the task until they create a pull request(PR) for review.
- Pick-up time: The waiting time duration from when the PR is created until the first reviewer starts reviewing it. (e.g., comments on it or assigns themselves).
- Review time: The time spent reviewing the PR. This starts when the PR review process is initiated and ends when the PR is merged.
- Deploy time: The time from merging the PR until the code is successfully deployed to production.
Note: The combination of pick-up and review time is known as PR cycle time.
To reduce issues, project teams use automation tools such as Jira, Trello, and Azure DevOps to track the cycle time more efficiently and accurately.
Importance Of Measuring Cycle Time
1. Identify workflow inefficiencies
Having a longer cycle period than expected indicates inefficiencies in the workflow that need to be fixed.
2. Pinpoint delayed stages
If the cycle time is tracked by breaking it into phases, the time spent in each phase provides extra insight. This allows the project team to decide whether an issue exists in a specific phase.
3. Support continuous improvement
Cycle time helps to decide whether changes made to the workflow positively impact the process. If the average cycle time increases over time, it means changes made previously have negatively impacted the process.
4. Defining realistic goals
When estimating and setting deadlines for tasks, teams can get an idea using historical cycle time data of similar tasks. Since the past cycle time data reflects the team’s actual performance and ability, it helps to set achievable goals for the team.
5. Evaluate team performance
When you compare the cycle times of each task, you can get a good idea about which tasks each developer is good or bad at. Then, you can assign tasks suitably for each developer to improve overall team performance or conduct special training to improve personal performance.
How Can We Reduce Cycle Time?
1. Regularly monitor the workflow
The workflow must be reviewed to identify the issues and inefficiencies that cause delays in the workflow. It will make the process more streamlined and productive by eliminating these issues.
2. Limit the work in progress (WIP)
Restrict the number of tasks being worked on simultaneously to prevent overload. Also, set WIP limits based on your team’s performance to get the best out of your team more quickly and efficiently.
3. Break down larger tasks
Splitting larger tasks into smaller and manageable sub-tasks helps for faster completion and smoother progress without unnecessary delays.
4. Use automation tools
Automating the repetitive and time-consuming tasks to remove manual efforts and reduce errors while speeding up the workflow.
5. Enhance collaboration and communication
Use tools like Slack to enhance seamless communication among team members and reduce misunderstandings that can slow the workflow.
Challenges Of Measuring Cycle Time
1. Task complexity issues
Some tasks can have longer cycle times than others due to their complexity, which can lead to misunderstandings. This can be solved by categorizing tasks based on their complexity.
2. Maintain consistent cycle time boundaries
Once the team defines clear cycle time boundaries (endpoints, start point), they should apply the same boundaries consistently to every task. If not, cycle time data could be inaccurate, leading to poor decisions.
3. Tracking issues
If the status of tasks is not updated correctly or left in the wrong workflow stages, cycle time metrics could be unreliable. Therefore, teams should consistently update task status with proper labels to get accurate cycle time data.
Conclusion
Measuring cycle time plays a crucial role in enhancing overall productivity, searching for bottlenecks, and creating achievable targets in software development. By managing and keeping track of cycle times, teams can increase productivity, improve processes, and deliver features more quickly.
