Architecture & practice·Delivery, flow and technical debt
the work took four days once someone started it, and it had been sitting in the backlog since March.
Cycle time
The time from work starting to work finishing, excluding everything before someone picked it up. It is what teams can influence directly, which makes it the useful improvement target, and it is what teams quote when they want to look fast. Reporting cycle time to stakeholders who are experiencing lead time is one of the most common sources of mutual frustration between engineering and everyone else.