In Agile, two metrics often steal the spotlight:

• Velocity: How much work a team completes in a sprint
• Cycle Time: How long it takes to finish a single task

People love to debate which one is better, but here's the truth: you don't have to choose. Using both together gives you a clearer picture of your team's performance.

Velocity and Cycle Time Explained

How Many Pizzas We Deliver in a Day

Everyone loves a good pizza analogy. For example, the most common lead time vs. cycle time formula is:

Lead time is between a phone call to order pizza and a pizza guy knocking on the door.

Cycle time is the time from starting cooking to the knock on the door.

Now, imagine you're running "Agile Pizzeria," a bustling pizza delivery service. You want to understand how efficiently your team is working to improve your service and get more happy clients.

Velocity: Your Daily Pizza Output

To start off, you would want to know how productive your team is. You decide to measure how many pizzas your team can make and deliver in a single day. This is your velocity.

• On Monday, your team delivers 30 pizzas.
• By Friday, they deliver 80 pizzas (Happy Friday does its job).

This information helps you plan: if you know your team can handle 80 pizzas daily, you can confidently accept many orders without overwhelming your staff.

Cycle Time: Speed of Individual Orders

As we said earlier, cycle time measures how long it takes for a single pizza order to go from being placed to being delivered.

• On Monday, it takes about 45 minutes for each pizza order.
• By Friday, you've improved to 30 minutes per pizza.

But when you inspect your cycle time in closer detail, you notice:

• One of your delivery vehicles is older and slower, increasing delivery times for its routes—a bottleneck you must fix.
• Due to the mix-up, the orders are sometimes delivered to the wrong addresses.
• The last important thing is that while fancy pizzas are more expensive, simple pizzas are easier and quicker to make. You also sell Quick-Fix slices, which are pretty popular. So, considering your menu when calculating cycle time makes sense.

The Pizza Menu: How Different Issue Types Affect Your Metrics

Let’s take a closer look at your menu.

You have:

1. Classic Margheritas (like user stories in software development). These are your bread and butter (or bread and tomato sauce, in this case). They contribute steadily to your velocity and have a consistent cycle time.
2. Gourmet Specialty Pizzas (similar to complex features). These take longer to prepare. Too many of these in a day might lower your overall velocity and increase your average cycle time.
3. Quick-Fix Slices (comparable to bug fixes). These are fast to make and can boost your daily velocity and potentially bring down your average cycle time.

Putting It All Together

Let's look at a typical Friday at Agile Pizzeria:

• You deliver 80 pizzas (high velocity).
• Your average cycle time is 30 minutes (efficient delivery).

Now, if we’re taking your menu into account:

• 50 Classic Margheritas: 30 minutes each
• 20 Gourmet Specialty Pizzas: 45 minutes each
• 10 Quick-Fix Slices: 5 minutes each

Making Improvements in Agile Processes Using Velocity and Cycle Time Data

Here are a few key areas to focus on:

1. Address Bottlenecks in Delivery:
   Just like how an old delivery vehicle slows down pizza deliveries, bottlenecks in your workflow—such as slow code reviews or testing phases—can increase cycle time. Identifying these bottlenecks allows you to streamline processes and speed up delivery, ensuring that tasks move through the pipeline more efficiently.
2. Balance Workload Between Different Task Types:
   In our pizza analogy, Quick-Fix Slices (small bug fixes) are fast to deliver, but they don’t contribute as much to overall velocity or value as full pizzas (larger features). Similarly, in Agile, focusing too much on small tasks may inflate your velocity but won’t necessarily deliver significant value to customers. Aim for a balanced mix of small and large tasks to maintain both high velocity and meaningful progress.
3. Outliers and Unexpected Delays:
   Just like that one Margherita pizza that took 60 minutes due to a delivery address mix-up, outliers in your workflow can skew your cycle time data. It’s important to investigate these outliers—whether it’s a task that was blocked by dependencies or an unexpected bug—and find ways to prevent similar delays in the future.
4. Optimize Quick Wins Without Over-relying on Them:
   Quick-Fix Slices are great for keeping customers happy with fast service, but they’re less profitable than full pizzas. In Agile, quick wins (like bug fixes or minor tweaks) can help keep stakeholders satisfied in the short term, but focusing too much on them may prevent you from tackling larger, more impactful features. Ensure that quick wins are balanced with more substantial work that drives long-term value.
5. Improve Estimation Accuracy:
   Use historical data from both velocity and cycle time to improve future sprint planning. If you know that Gourmet Specialty Pizzas (complex features) consistently take longer than expected, adjust your estimates accordingly. This will help you avoid overcommitting and ensure more realistic sprint goals.

By addressing these areas, you can improve both your team’s velocity and cycle time, leading to faster delivery of high-quality work and better overall performance in your Agile processes.

This approach ties together the idea of balancing different types of work (like pizzas) with optimizing efficiency and ensuring that you're focusing on delivering meaningful value rather than just inflating metrics with quick fixes.

Velocity and Cycle Time in Jira: Where to Start?

Exploring Default Jira Tools for Agile Teams

The first instinct is to turn to Jira's built-in features for tracking velocity and cycle time. After all, your team is already using the platform, so it seems logical to start there. There are two main options:

1. Jira Control Chart: This tool shows cycle time and lead time for sprints, products, or versions. While it provides some useful data, there are limitations:
   • It's restricted to board-specific data, making it challenging to get a comprehensive view across multiple projects or teams.
   • Customization options are limited, preventing deep dives into specific metrics.
   • It lacks detailed breakdowns of time spent in different statuses.
2. Jira Velocity Chart: This native report gives a basic overview of your team's velocity over time. However, it has some drawbacks:
   • It's based solely on story points, which can be subjective and inconsistent across teams.
   • The chart is quite basic, lacking the detailed analytics needed for data-driven decision-making.
   • It's limited in the number of sprints it can analyze, making long-term trend spotting difficult.

After trying to piece together meaningful insights from these native tools, most Scrum masters are left feeling frustrated. While they can see glimpses of useful information, it's not enough to drive the kind of improvements their team needs.

Discovering Advanced Tools for Agile Analytics

Realizing that Jira's native tools aren't sufficient, you begin exploring the Atlassian Marketplace.

Among the ocean of charts, two powerful add-ons stand out: the Agile Velocity Chart Gadget and the Cycle Time Chart Gadget. How are they different from other apps?

The Agile Velocity Chart Gadget: Three Vital Velocity Charts

1. Team Velocity Chart:
   This chart shows how much work your team can do in each sprint. It helps you plan better, predict when things will be done, and see if your team is getting faster over time. You can also compare different teams to see who's doing well and learn from them. It's great for making sure you're not giving your team too much or too little work.
2. Benchmarking Chart:
   This chart lets you see how different teams are doing side by side. It shows the average performance and highlights the top and bottom performers. You can easily spot which teams are doing really well or might need some help. It's like a report card for all your teams, helping you understand where everyone stands.
3. Individual Velocity Chart:
   This chart looks at how each person on the team is doing. It shows you who might be taking on too much work or who might need some extra help. It's useful for making sure everyone has the right amount of work and for figuring out if someone needs more training in certain areas.

Together, these charts give you a clear picture of how fast your team is working, how they compare to other teams, and how each team member is contributing.

Across all charts in the Agile Velocity Chart Gadget:

• Advanced Metrics: Gain insights into factors like rollover, scope change, and estimation accuracy for a nuanced understanding of performance.
• 3-level Breakdowns: Analyze data by various parameters such as issue type, priority, or custom fields, and layer breakdowns the way you need.
• Detailed Issue Lists: Drill down to specific issues contributing to velocity metrics.

The Cycle Time Chart Gadget: Histogram, Trend, Time in Status Charts

While velocity gives you a big-picture view of your team's output, the Cycle Time Chart Gadget is for more granular insights into your processes:

1. Bottlenecks Identification: The Time in Status feature shows you exactly where work is getting stuck in your workflow.
2. Predictability at the Story Level: You can now provide accurate estimates for individual stories based on historical cycle times for similar work.
3. Continuous Improvement Metrics: By tracking cycle time trends, you can see if your process improvements are actually making work flow faster.
4. Work Item Comparison: You can now see if certain types of stories consistently take longer, helping you refine your estimation process.
5. Percentile Analysis: Instead of just averages, you can now say things like, "85% of our bug fixes are completed within X days," providing more nuanced and accurate estimates.

The Perfect Agile Analytics Suite

With both the Velocity Chart Gadget and Cycle Time Chart Gadget in place, you create a robust analytical suite that seamlessly integrates into your Jira workflow:

1. Seamless Jira Integration: Both gadgets can be placed side by side on your Jira dashboard, creating a one-stop shop for all your key metrics.
2. Real-Time Data Updates: The gadgets pull data directly from your Jira instance, ensuring you're always looking at the most up-to-date information.
3. Unlimited Sprint Analysis: Unlike some native Jira tools, both gadgets allow you to analyze an unlimited number of sprints, enabling long-term trend spotting.
4. Multi-Team Support: Both tools can aggregate data from multiple teams or projects, providing a birds-eye view of performance across different parts of the organization.
5. Flexible Date Ranges: You're not limited to predefined time boxes. Both gadgets allow you to set custom date ranges for analysis.
6. Advanced Data Breakdowns: You can analyze performance by issue type, priority, assignee, or any custom field you use in Jira.
7. Powerful Filtering: Focus your analysis on specific types of work, team members, or any other criteria important to you.
8. Complementary Metrics: While velocity focuses on output (how much work is completed), cycle time focuses on efficiency (how quickly work flows through your system). Together, they provide a balanced view of productivity and process efficiency.

What You Can Achieve with Advanced Velocity and Cycle Time Analytics

With these powerful tools at your disposal, you will see a dramatic transformation in your team's performance:

1. Predictable Delivery: Sprint planning becomes more accurate, and you can provide stakeholders with reliable timelines for feature delivery.
2. Process Optimization: You identify and eliminate bottlenecks in your workflow, significantly reducing cycle times for all types of work.
3. Data-Driven Improvements: Every process change is now backed by data, allowing you to measure its impact and make informed decisions.
4. Enhanced Communication: With clear, visual metrics, team members and stakeholders alike have a shared understanding of performance and capacity.
5. Continuous Improvement: The combination of velocity and cycle time metrics provides a roadmap for ongoing optimization of your Agile processes.

FAQ

What are velocity and cycle time in Agile?

Cycle time measures how long it takes to complete a single item from start to finish. Velocity measures the amount of work a team completes in a sprint, typically in story points.

How do you calculate velocity and cycle time in Jira?

In Jira, velocity is calculated by summing the story points of completed issues in a sprint. You can use a native Velocity chart, or you can employ the Agile Velocity Chart Gadget for advanced velocity analytics. Cycle time is measured from when an issue moves to "In Progress" until it reaches "Done". Jira's Control Chart can help visualize cycle time - or the Cycle Time Chart Gadget.

Why is cycle time often considered better than velocity for measuring team performance?

Cycle time is harder to manipulate, provides a clearer picture of process efficiency, and is directly linked to business outcomes. It also accounts for delays and bottlenecks that velocity might miss.

Can velocity be used for long-term planning in Agile?

While velocity can be used for sprint planning, it's less reliable for long-term forecasts due to its variability. Cycle time often provides more consistent data for longer-term planning.

How can teams improve their velocity and cycle time in Agile?

Teams can improve by breaking work into smaller chunks, identifying and addressing bottlenecks, streamlining processes, and continuously refining estimation techniques.

What are the limitations of Jira's built-in velocity and cycle time tools?

Jira's native tools can be basic. The Velocity Chart doesn't account for scope changes, and the Control Chart can be complex to interpret. Third-party add-ons often provide more comprehensive analytics.

How often should teams review their velocity and cycle time metrics?

It's recommended to review velocity at the end of each sprint and monitor cycle time weekly. Regular reviews help teams identify trends and make timely adjustments.

Can velocity and cycle time be used together effectively in Agile teams?

Yes, using both metrics provides a more comprehensive view of team performance. Velocity offers insight into output quantity, while cycle time focuses on process efficiency.

How do story point estimates affect velocity and cycle time measurements?

Story point estimates directly impact velocity calculations but don't affect cycle time. Inaccurate estimates can skew velocity, while cycle time remains based on actual time spent.

Are there any risks in focusing too much on improving velocity or reducing cycle time?

Yes, overemphasis on these metrics can lead to rushed work, decreased quality, or manipulation of numbers. It's important to balance these metrics with other factors like quality and team well-being.

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