Cycle Time

What

Cycle Time is among the most widely tracked metrics among engineering teams and a great way to identify bottlenecks in the development process. Cycle time, also known as lead time, is measured as the delta of time of first commit and time of deployment. Cycle time is most often looked at to understand the engineering teams’ speed. Read about one of the most widely used Software Engineering Analytics Metric - Cycle Time

Why

Hatica has an entire dashboard dedicated to measuring cycle time.

Cycle time is comprised of the following steps/metrics:

1. Coding time: This is the time taken by engineers in writing code. The time from first commit to opening the PR is called coding time. This time also includes time to think, experiment, collaborate on different ideas. It is not uncommon to see higher coding times on new projects/issues as this step demands experimentation.
2. Review time: Once coding is complete, a Pull Request (a.k.a, Merge Request) is raised to merge the changes onto the main code base, but after a review of the code for quality, complexity, test cases, and others. So, review time is the Time it takes from PR open to the first review.
3. Rework time: In cases where code changes are suggested post review, it falls under rework time. Rework time is the time it takes from first review to merging the PR. This comprises of the cycle of updating the PR based on review to getting a followup review till the PR is merged.

Related reading

1. Hatica’s Cycle Time Dashboard.
2. Read Hatica’s deep dive blog post on Cycle time.
3. Read Hatica’s blog post on Effective code review practices.