Azure DevOps: Understanding Cycle Time
Azure DevOps, Microsoft’s comprehensive solution for software development and delivery, provides an extensive array of tools and widgets for project management and tracking. Among them, a crucial one helps measure the elapsed time it takes for your team to complete work items once they start actively working on them. This metric, referred to as ‘Cycle Time’.
Cycle Time, the Correct Tool for the Job.
Given the scenario where you’re configuring project metrics for dashboards in Azure DevOps, you might ask — which widget should you employ to track the time it takes from the moment a work item becomes active to its completion?
The correct answer is the Cycle Time widget. Its primary function is to calculate the duration from when a work item enters an ‘active’ state until it’s marked as ‘complete’. Hence, it offers teams valuable insights about their process efficiency and potential bottlenecks.
Understanding Other Widgets
Before we delve deeper into Cycle Time, let’s understand some other widgets and why they might not be the best fit for this purpose.
- Cumulative Flow Diagram: This is a valuable tool that visualizes work in progress, completion rates, and potential bottlenecks. However, it doesn’t directly measure the time taken to complete active work items.
- Burnup Chart: This is used to track the amount of work completed over time against the total work scope. While useful, it doesn’t give specific insights into the time it takes to complete individual active work items.
- Burndown Chart: A burndown chart displays the amount of work left to do versus time. It is an excellent tool for tracking project completion over time, but it doesn’t measure the duration to complete active work items.
Why Cycle Time?
By measuring Cycle Time, teams can quantify their efficiency and identify areas where work progresses slower than expected. This metric helps teams make data-driven decisions to streamline their processes, reduce the time taken for tasks, and ultimately deliver value faster.
To summarize, while Azure DevOps offers a range of widgets for various purposes, Cycle Time is the go-to widget for measuring the elapsed time to complete work items once they become active.
