Cycle Time: Your Guide to Improving Software Development Efficiency

Every second in your workflow matters. The time it takes to complete each task can be the difference between hitting your goals or falling behind. Cycle time helps you understand the actual time it takes to turn your ideas into deliverables.

Focusing on this critical metric helps you gain a clear picture of where your production time is spent and uncover areas that slow you down. Tracking cycle time is the starting point to drive continuous improvement and deliver results faster.

At Axify, we help you measure and improve your entire process with real-time data. This empowers your team to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

In this article, you'll learn how to calculate cycle time, improve it with actionable tips, and use it as a powerful tool to enhance your development process. Let’s see how Axify can help you achieve faster, more predictable results while meeting your goals effectively.

What is Cycle Time?

Cycle time is the amount of time it takes for your software development team to complete a task from start to finish. This key performance indicator measures the elapsed time between starting a process and delivering the finished product for your clients. 

Cycle time is a key metric that originates in lean manufacturing. It showcases your efficiency and is useful to follow to make meaningful process improvements.

After all, efficiency can be defined as production time divided by total process time.

Shorter cycle times mean you can respond to customer demand more quickly, reduce processing time, and achieve faster delivery times. We believe that focusing on your actual cycle time rather than estimates or averages can help you make data-driven decisions to improve your workflow and customer satisfaction.

With VSM, you can assess which phases of the development cycle take up most of your team's time. You can also sort items in ascending or descending timeframe and customize the time period you’re analyzing.

Why Follow Cycle Time?

Cycle time is like a lens that helps you see where your time is being spent in the production process and identify where improvements are needed. Let’s see a more complete breakdown of the reasons to follow this metric.

Understand Time and Bottlenecks

This crucial metric reveals exactly how much time each process step takes. That’s how you uncover bottlenecks like high queue time. For example, if your team spends too much time in QA or waiting for code reviews, it can delay delivery and disrupt workflows.

But more importantly, too much time spent in QA indicates quality issues or unnecessary steps in your process. 

Therefore, you can target these specific issues to reduce delays. Similarly, inefficiencies in other parts of your production process—such as long pickup times for tasks, bottlenecks in deployment, or excessive time spent addressing technical debt—can cause significant slowdowns if not addressed.

Technical debt, while not a formal step in the process, manifests as tasks that take longer than expected due to outdated code or unresolved issues. By identifying and resolving these delays, you create a smoother workflow that supports your team’s ability to deliver quality results on time.

Your engineering team can then focus on what matters most: delivering faster and more consistent results.

Create a Shared Understanding

Unlike outdated metrics like story points, cycle time reflects the actual time your team spends on a task. It’s simple, clear, and easy to communicate. Plus, business stakeholders understand elapsed time better than technical metrics.

This shared understanding helps you build trust with stakeholders and align your production rate with your customer's expectations. Sometimes, using cycle time instead of velocity helps you avoid focusing on quantity rather than quality, as well. Of course, this also reduces labor costs.

Improve Predictability

If you streamline your cycle time phases, you'll improve predictability across your business processes. Faster cycle times ensure that you consistently deliver progress toward your objectives. 

This enhances your ability to plan better delivery times and develop higher-quality software. Ultimately, it’s how you improve customer satisfaction.

Cycle Time Formula

The cycle time formula is straightforward. You should track the actual time spent working on a task down to the hours and minutes. Don't just focus on counting days. 

Measuring elapsed time correctly is more accurate and, therefore, enables faster turnaround times.

Average Cycle Time Calculation

You can calculate the average cycle time per item by dividing the total cycle time of all completed items by the number of items.

This approach highlights bottlenecks and inefficiencies across stages, such as development, review, or QA. Basically, following this formula helps you focus on optimizing the entire process, not just the output. 

That’s because you get deeper insights by emphasizing time spent in specific stages. So, your teams can tackle delays where they matter most and achieve smoother, faster workflows.

What is a Good Cycle Time?

At Axify, we believe that there’s no universal standard for an ideal cycle time because every team and workflow is unique. However, based on our experience, elite teams can complete a user story in less than three days, while good teams typically finish within a week.

When you leverage agile development, you prioritize delivering value sooner. 

Remember: “Sooner” is not the sole keyword here. “Value” is equally important. Faster time to production is an indicator of business success and leads to significant cost savings but only if you deliver high-quality products that capture customer loyalty.

Your agile team can reach its target cycle time and deliver value if you break big user stories into smaller, manageable ones. This simple change speeds up current performance and lets you deliver results more frequently. It also cuts down pickup time between tasks and keeps your team focused while completing company goals efficiently.

You should focus on maintaining momentum and improving predictability, which benefits both your team and your customers.

Cycle Time vs. Lead Time for Changes

When managing your development workflow, it's important to understand the differences between cycle time and lead time for changes. While both metrics measure time, they serve different purposes and offer unique insights into your process.

What Is Lead Time for Changes?

Lead time for changes shows you how long it takes to tackle a change from the first commit to production. It’s your go-to metric for understanding how quickly a requested change moves from request to deployment.

This metric entails several steps, such as code reviews, testing, and merging pull requests. Lead time reflects your ability to deliver updates or features efficiently.

How Lead Time Affects Cycle Time

Your lead time for changes directly influences your cycle time because improving the “inner loop” speeds up the “outer loop.”

Here’s what happens:

Typically, a user story consists of multiple pull requests. If you improve each pull request's journey from commit to deployment, you create a smoother workflow. 

You can complete user stories faster if you have:

• Shorter pull request review times 
• Faster approvals 
• Shorter testing phases with no delayed reviews 

All this improves cycle time. This leads us to the next point.

How to Improve Cycle Time: PRO Tips from Axify’s Experience

At Axify, we believe that improving your cycle time starts with understanding your entire development process. If you focus on visibility, collaboration, and reducing inefficiencies, you can take meaningful steps to streamline your workflows and deliver faster results. Here’s how you can get started.

Make Your Work Visible

The first step to improvement is clarity. You need to see the full picture of your software development lifecycle (SDLC) and every sub-phase. We recommend that you map out your value stream to identify where time is spent and where delays occur. When you make the problem visible, you empower your team to address it.

For example, tracking pull requests can help you spot idle time when tasks sit untouched. Axify doesn’t just help you monitor cycle time phases for pull requests (PR cycle time). It also tracks your issue cycle time. These metrics help you rebalance your workload by setting correct priorities and, therefore, minimize bottlenecks.

Reduce Work in Progress (WIP)

Too much WIP clogs your workflow and increases cycle time. Focusing on fewer tasks at once allows your team to complete work faster and with fewer errors.

Collaborative methods like mob programming can also help reduce WIP by encouraging your team members to work on a single task together. This also minimizes context-switching and improves your overall productivity.

Adopt Smaller Batches and Leverage the S.P.I.D.R. Technique

Breaking work into smaller, manageable batches can definitely speed up your delivery processes. Instead of deploying every two weeks, you should aim for weekly or even daily deployments.

Smaller batches reduce risk, make testing faster, and allow you to deliver value to your users more frequently. Your agile team can thrive on continuous delivery, and adopting smaller batches can significantly improve your cycle time.

The S.P.I.D.R. technique helps you structure tasks in a way that reduces complexity and speeds up completion. It consists of five methods: 

• Spike, which involves research or prototyping to gain knowledge about complex features. 
• Path, splitting stories based on different user workflows. 
• Interfaces, delivering functionality progressively across platforms or UI versions. 
• Data, starting with basic or restricted data types and adding complexity later. 
• Rules, temporarily relaxing requirements to simplify initial implementation. 

When your tasks are more manageable, you can finish them faster without sacrificing quality.

Identify and Eliminate Delays

Idle time is your biggest enemy. Delays typically happen when pull requests sit waiting for approval or when work gets stuck between phases.

You can use Axify to track where work stagnates and address the root causes of these delays. For example, if approvals are taking too long, you should consider assigning backups to handle reviews or streamlining the approval process.

Reduce Hand-Offs

Every time you pass work between team members or departments, you’re adding delays. Fewer hand-offs mean less time wasted waiting or explaining things.

You should focus on assigning tasks to smaller, dedicated teams that can see the work through from start to finish. This approach keeps your cycle time on track and minimizes bottlenecks.

Invest in Automation

Automation is key to faster cycle times. You can free up your team to focus on what matters most by automating repetitive tasks like testing, deployments, and hotfix rollouts. It also ensures consistency and lets you respond quickly to errors by reducing downtime and maintaining momentum.

Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement

You shouldn't treat cycle time as a one-time effort because it’s an ongoing process. We advise you to regularly review your workflows, collect feedback, and make adjustments to keep improving.

Also, you can encourage your team to focus on efficiency without compromising quality. With the right mindset, you’ll see sustained improvements in your cycle time and overall delivery.

You can make impactful changes to your process by following these tips and leveraging Axify’s insights. Faster cycle times mean more predictable outcomes, happier customers, and a more motivated team.

Follow Essential Metrics with Axify

Tracking the right metrics is important to improving your team’s efficiency and delivering consistent results. Axify helps you gain real-time insights into essential metrics like cycle time and lead time, offering comprehensive value stream visibility. 

These metrics and features help you uncover bottlenecks, reduce delays, and make data-driven decisions that move your team forward.

While staring at numbers and statistics can be a good first step, we at Axify offer you context as well.

Our Value Stream feature highlights areas of value loss in the software development process. Understanding these pain points helps you streamline workflows, decrease time to market, and improve your business operations.

What sets Axify apart is its ability to simplify complex processes. 

Teams and engineering leaders can benefit from an easy-to-use platform that aligns your metrics with your goals. Axify equips you with valuable insights that you can use to improve your software development process while fostering collaboration across your team.

Ready to take control of your cycle time and streamline your workflows? 

Book a demo with Axify today and see how we can help you deliver smarter, faster, and more effectively.