The purpose of this chart
Cycle Time is is the length of time it takes for a piece of work to travel through your workflow (or a portion of your workflow based on your configurations).
The Cycle Time histogram is is a bar chart that shows the distribution of your various cycle times. In other words, it shows you how often you achieve a certain cycle time.
How to read the chart
The horizontal axis represents a Cycle Time. In this case, the number of days it took to complete items.
The vertical axis represents a Frequency. In this case, the frequency means the number of items that had that particular cycle time for the data shown.
In the chart to the right, you can see that more of our items have a cycle time of 1 day than any other option. But But there were 15 items that had a cycle time of 5 days, 10 items that had a cycle time of 7 days, etc.
Hover over any bar to see the frequency of a given throughput.
Key Chart Controls
Click on any image to make it bigger!
Percentiles
When you choose this option, the chart looks at all of the work items represented by and draws percentile lines at certain locations.
These lines can be interpreted as "XX% of items finished in X days or less"
For example, in the image to the right, you can say that 70% of our items were finished in 13 days or less. Or, you could say that 95% of our items were finished in 31 days or less.
Item Filter
You can filter down the items represented on this chart by choosing one or more available filters.
If you want to clear your filters so that all items are represented again, you click the Reset button.
Additional Chart Controls
Blocked Items
By default, the option "Include Time Blocked" is selected. If you deselect this option, you will see the chart change to show what the cycle times would have been if the items had not been blocked. Essentially it subtracts blocked (aka Flagged in Jira terms) time from the overall cycle time of each item and then plots them on the chart.
Cursor
When you choose Cycle Time or Frequency, the value on the relevant axis will be highlighted based on your cursor placement
Overlay
Choose whether or not you would like to add a cumulative percentile line. With this line, you can see when a certain percentage of your finished items are accounted for at any given point on the horizontal axis.
Layout: Show Date Control
Use this to zoom into any specific subset of your data. You can narrow down the data horizontally (smaller time scale) and/or vertically (to narrow the range of throughput).
Workflow Stages
If you want to track the throughput of a smaller portion of your workflow, deselect the workflow stages you'd like to exclude.
When you remove workflow stages from the end of the list, it changes what it means to be done and therefore affects how many items are considered as throughput. So now, items entering In Review are considered finished.
