The Cycle Time Breakdown graph shows, in detail, the percentage of time spent at each stage of your development cycle for the given period. You can display this data by week or by sprint, depending on your preference. However, note that if a Kanban-type board has been linked to your Axify project, the "sprint" option will not be available in the filters at the top of the page.
Psst! Be careful not to confuse this graph with the one that has a similar name available in the Technical Axis since they do not use the same data (different sources for the two axes).
Reading the graph
For the following graph, the period displayed corresponds to the last three months and the display mode is per week. On average, we can see that the duration of the cycle time is 3 days and 1 hour. However, we can also see that this duration has once exceeded 5 days.
As this graph is interactive, hovering over it with your mouse will display more details for a given week. For example, for one week, we can see that more than 74% (3 days and 21 hours in this case) of the time was spent on the In Progress stage.
Considering the color code, we can see a change in the time allocation in the following weeks. Depending on the context, we could see a reduction of time spent In review or at To deploy if the team increases its level of collaboration or automates certain deployment processes.
These are examples among many others. The objective here is to have a shorter cycle time (see red dotted line), but above all to have a cycle time that is as stable as possible and to target the blockers quickly in order to address them.
This graph also includes a variation indicator, which compares the average cycle time invested in the current period to the average cycle time in the previous period. To learn more about the variation indicator and its calculation, check out this article!
Calculating the metric
The time invested in each stage of your development cycle is calculated from week to week, or from sprint to sprint, depending on the display mode selected. In the case of the previous example, the total time invested in all the stages (i.e. Architecture plan, In progress, etc) each week is considered. Then, a percentage is attributed to each step according to the time invested in it compared to the total cycle time.