Ticket Lead Time

Track and improve the speed at which you are able to deliver features.

Purpose

Being effective and responsive to customer needs depends a lot on the cadence and flow of the delivery process. One indication of the delivery process flow is the lifecycle time of feature and bug tickets. The ticket lead time tracks the time of a ticket from entering the backlog to being closed. The shorter the lead time, the more responsive an organisation can potentially be.

Improvement Actions: Long lead times might result from too large tasks that have either not been specified clearly or are not broken down further. More detailed and broken-down tasks can help to make improvements.

While not always possible, smaller tasks typically lead to shorter review cycles, less QA work and easier schedulability by the team as well.

Other causes for long lead times include resource-constrained and overloaded teams that are challenged with interrupting work.

Explanations

This report tracks the ticket lifecycle for teams and boards. Unlike Jira and similar planning tools, views can be aggregated across boards and across teams for a holistic view. Some of the charts in this report include:

Lead Time: The cycle time from creating a ticked until it is closed, i.e., being done.

Stages: Breakdown of lead time into their respective ticket stages. By default, these:

• Backlog: time from ticket creation to an assignment to a contributor.

• Pickup: time from being assigned until its status changes to an in-progress stage.

• Resolution: time from being in progress until being marked as resolved/done etc.

Distribution: Shows all the tickets clustered into different lead time buckets. This enables you to quickly identify outliers and investigate why certain tickets might have taken a long time to close. Common causes can indicate specific work patterns or process problems to be addressed.

Breakdown by Stage: Shows the lead time trend over time broken down by lifecycle stage. This gives indications about work pattern consistency and changes in efficiency.

Issue Type breakdown: This view shows how different ticket types (Issue types as defined in Jira, GitHub Projects, etc.) are affecting their respective lead times. Oftentimes, not all ticket types are handled equally in an organisation, and variances are expected. Conversely, it might point to problems with certain issue types.

Good to Know

By default, all the status changes, progress stages and issue types are imported from your connected planning tool, such as Jira, GitHub Projects, etc. For consistency, Logilica maps status to the categories of Backlog, In Progress and Resolution. See more details of the mapping.