Lead Time, Cycle Time and Wait Time

What is Lead Time, Cycle Time and Wait Time

• Lead time: Lead time is the amount of time that passes from the start of the development process of an item through to its completion. (Issue created → Issue completed)

• Cycle time: Cycle Time is the amount of time a team spends actually working on producing an item, up until the product is ready for shipment. (Issue In Progress → Issue completed)

• Wait time: Wait time is the amount of time that passes from the start of a process until a team actually start working on it. (Issue created → Issue In Progress)

Why Lead Time, Cycle Time and Wait Time matters

Typically, customers want their product shipped as fast as possible with minimal effort.

Understanding how long it takes your team to design, build, review and ship a feature is key to answering the question from your customer “When will I get it?”. Teams can respond with a greater degree of certainty and confidence when managing stakeholder expectations on the time it can take to deliver your goals.

For teams applying the agile method, their practices are grounded in the 12 Agile Principles, with relevant principles focussed on frequent, continuous delivery:

• Principle #1 Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software

• Principle #3 Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

• Principle #10 Simplicity - the art of maximising the amount of work not done - is essential

Teams that practice Kanban focus on throughput, and as a result they usually put a heavy emphasis on Lead Time. The faster a team can move tasks through the pipes, the better throughput they can achieve.

Scrum teams can use Lead Time can understand how long it takes to complete items. Teams can also cross check this measure with their rate of Completed Work which helps them understand how much you can get done relative to what they think they can get done.

Lead Time is a valuable measure of your team’s Continuous Delivery practices, allowing teams to inspect all parts of your delivery process to find inefficiencies that are holding your team back.

Better understanding your time cycle (for example, idea to development is 2 weeks, but idea to live is 2 months) helps you understand where in the delivery lifecycle you’re most blocked. Your team can then more confidently choose where to focus their efforts in making small improvements to most positively impact their workflow.

Time taken across all items worked in the sprint provides insight into the complexity of the work being undertaken to release to customers.

Lead Time can also be used as a measure of your team’s predictability by indicating how consistently they take to build and merge items over time.

What good looks like

The goal of measuring a team’s Cycle Time is to quantify and understand the speed at which your team can deliver working software.

Shorter cycle times mean an optimised process and faster time to market. Shorter cycle times are also indicative of an iterative working culture working on small batches of work with higher release cycles. The benefits of smaller lead and cycle times are improved quality, accelerated learning and lower cost to produce.

Longer Cycle times usually indicate waste or inefficiencies in your team’s workflow, resulting in delays for your customers.

How Umano measures this

By reviewing all tickets within an iteration, Umano identifies all the tickets that were completed within the iteration that were present at the start. We then Identify when each of the tickets that were completed during the sprint is created (created_time), when they were moved to progress (moved_to_progress_time) and when each of the tickets was completed (completed_time).

The median time for all tickets completed in the sprint is then assigned to Lead, Cycle and Wait times.

Practices that influence this measure

• Number of ticket additions mid-sprint

• The ratio of change in ticket titles

• The ratio of change in ticket descriptions

• The ratio of change in ticket acceptance criteria

• Number of tickets inherited to the active interval from a previous sprint

• Wait time of tickets

• Cycle time of tickets

What’s included?

Each model looks and specific activities within the tools. Below a list of activities that contribute to Lead, Cycle and Wait Time and activities that do not have an impact on this metric.

Tips for improving Lead Time, Cycle Time and Wait Time

Resources

Cycle Time vs Lead Time vs Takt Time: https://tulip.co/blog/lean-manufacturing/cycle-vs-lead-vs-takt/