I've never encountered cycle time recommended as a metric for evaluating individual developer productivity, making the central premise of this article rather misguided.
The primary value of measuring cycle time is precisely that it captures end-to-end process inefficiencies, variability, and bottlenecks, rather than individual effort. This systemic perspective is fundamental in Kanban methodology, where cycle time and its variance are commonly used to forecast delivery timelines.
> The primary value of measuring cycle time is precisely that it captures end-to-end process inefficiencies, variability, and bottlenecks, rather than individual effort
Yes! Waiting for responses from colleagues, slow CI pipelines, inefficient local dev processes, other teams constantly breaking things and affecting you, someone changing JIRA yet again, someone's calendar being full, stakeholders not available to clear up questions around requirements, poor internal documentation, spiraling testing complexity due to microservices etc. The list is endless
It's borderline cruel to take cycle time and measure and judge the developer alone.
> We analyze cycle time, a widely-used metric measuring time from ticket creation to completion, using a dataset of over 55,000 observations across 216 organizations. [...] We find precise but modest associations between cycle time and factors including coding days per week, number of merged pull requests, and degree of collaboration. However, these effects are set against considerable unexplained variation both between and within individuals.
My current org can have a cycle time on the order of a year. Embedded dev work on limited release cadence where the Jira (et. al.) workflow is sub-optimal and tickets don’t get reassigned, only tested, destroys metrics of this nature.
If this research is aimed at web-dev, sure I get it. I only read the intro. Software happens outside of webdev a lot, like a whole lot.
The primary value of measuring cycle time is precisely that it captures end-to-end process inefficiencies, variability, and bottlenecks, rather than individual effort. This systemic perspective is fundamental in Kanban methodology, where cycle time and its variance are commonly used to forecast delivery timelines.
Yes! Waiting for responses from colleagues, slow CI pipelines, inefficient local dev processes, other teams constantly breaking things and affecting you, someone changing JIRA yet again, someone's calendar being full, stakeholders not available to clear up questions around requirements, poor internal documentation, spiraling testing complexity due to microservices etc. The list is endless
It's borderline cruel to take cycle time and measure and judge the developer alone.
If this research is aimed at web-dev, sure I get it. I only read the intro. Software happens outside of webdev a lot, like a whole lot.