We're excited to introduce one of the essential metrics for engineering organizations - Cycle Time! In essence, Cycle Time indicates how fast does code go from a developer's workstation to production. Studies show that measuring and improving the Cycle Time will enable organizations to innovate at a faster pace, while also improving their teams’ morale and sense of ownership.

The Cycle Time metric is an indicator of an organization's development velocity. The Cycle Time metric is the sum of four metrics, each of these metrics corresponding to a stage in the software development process:

1. CODING - Time to Issue PR from First Commit. This metric corresponds to the coding time, and is the time elapsed from the first commit to creating a PR.
2. PICKUP - Time to First Review. This metric indicates how fast do reviewers pick up their peers' PRs for review, and is the time between when a PR is opened and the first time an engineer reviews that PR.
3. REVIEW - Time to Merge from First Review. This metric signifies how fast do submitters incorporate feedback from their peers in code review, and is the time from a PR's first review to that PR being merged.
4. DEPLOY - Time to Deploy from Merge. This metric is an indicator for how fast does code get deployed into production, and is the time between when a PR is merged to when it gets released into production.

What does each color indicate? 

We've aggregated benchmark values from our platform for each stage of the cycle time. Green bars indicate leading values, yellow bars indicate average values, and red bars indicate below-average values.

For CODING:

• Green: Less than 48 hours
• Yellow: Between 48 and 72 hours
• Red: More than 72 hours

For PICKUP:

• Green: Less than 24 hours
• Yellow: Between 24 and 72 hours
• Red: More than 72 hours

For REVIEW:

• Green: Less than 24 hours
• Yellow: Between 24 and 72 hours
• Red: More than 72 hours

For DEPLOY:

• Green: Less than 10 hours
• Yellow: Between 10 and 24 hours
• Red: More than 24 hours

You can visualize your teams' cycle time in the Dashboard, Project Timeline, and Team Performance reports. Individual cycle time can be found in the Developer Summary, and Developer Performance reports.