Development Cycle Time

The average time from starting work until release to production.

What is the intended behavior?

Reduce the time it takes to deliver refined work to production to mitigate the effects of priorities changing and get rapid feedback on quality.

How to improve it

• Decompose work so it can be delivered in smaller increments and by more team members.
• Identify and remove process waste, handoffs, and delays in the construction process.
• Improve test design.
• Automate and standardize the build and deploy pipeline.

How to game it

• Move things to “Done” status that are not in production.
• Move items directly from “Backlog” to “Done” after deploying to production.
• Split work into functional tasks that should be considered part of development (development task, testing task, etc.).

Guardrail Metrics

Metrics to use in combination with this metric to prevent unintended consequences.

• Quality decreases if quality processes are skipped.
• Standard deviation of the control chart can show issues being closed too rapidly.

References

• “Accelerate” Ch2: Measuring Performance - Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble & Gene Kim