Pedro Arantes
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Cycle Time

If a company takes ten days to deliver a feature to its customer on average, its cycle time is ten days.
#agile
#business
#cycle-time
#product-development
#time-to-market
Zettelkasten, April 21st, 2022.
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Notes

  • Cycle time is how fast a team finishes some work, for example, a product or a feature.

  • It is the amount of time a task spends in the system through all steps.

  • The shorter the cycle time, the shorter the time-to-market.

  • If a company takes ten days to deliver a feature to its customer on average, its cycle time is ten days.

  • One goal of business agility is to reduce cycle time.

  • The product manager must consider the working and waiting times to measure the cycle time. For instance, if the team has worked on a feature for one day (active working time) and it has taken nine days to wait for some approval, its cycle time was ten days.

  • You can use the Little's Law to find the average cycle time WW given the average WIP LL and the average throughput λ\lambda.

W(average cycle time)=L(average WIP)λ(average throughput)W (\text{average cycle time}) = \frac{L (\text{average WIP})}{\lambda (\text{average throughput})}

References

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