Cycle Time Report

The Cycle Time Report analyzes how long it takes work items to complete. It helps teams and individuals understand delivery cadence, identify bottlenecks, compare estimates against actual delivery time, and forecast future work.

The report is available from the Reports menu on:

• Team detail pages — analyzes work items owned by the team
• Employee detail pages — analyzes work items assigned to the employee

What Is Cycle Time?

Cycle Time measures the number of days between when work starts and when it finishes:

Cycle Time = Done Timestamp - Activated Timestamp (in days)

Only Requirement-tier work items, such as User Stories and Bugs, are included. Portfolio-tier items, such as Epics and Features, are excluded because they are containers rather than team-delivered units of work.

To contribute to the report, a work item must:

• Be a Requirement-tier work item
• Have a Done status category
• Have both an Activated timestamp and a Done timestamp
• Have a Done timestamp different from the Activated timestamp
• Fall within the selected Done date range

Items that moved directly to Done without being activated, or items that were Removed instead of completed, are excluded.

Related metrics shown on work item detail pages:

• Time to Start — Days from creation to activation
• Lead Time — Days from creation to completion

Report Scope

The same report behaves differently based on where it is opened:

Location	Scope
Team detail page	Requirement-tier work items owned by the team
Employee detail page	Requirement-tier work items assigned to the employee

The calculation rules, filters, chart, and grid behavior are the same for both scopes.

Configuring the Report

The report has three controls.

Done From

Filters work items completed on or after the selected date.

• Default: 90 days ago
• Presets: 30, 60, 90, 120, or 180 days
• Dates are interpreted from the beginning of the day in UTC

Percentile

Controls what percentage of work items to include after removing outliers.

• Default: 100%, which includes all eligible items
• Lower values remove extreme cycle times that can skew averages
• 0% excludes all items

Method

Determines how outliers are removed when percentile is below 100%. The default is Balanced.

Method	How It Works	Best For
Balanced	Trims equally from the fastest and slowest items. At 80th percentile, removes the top 10% and bottom 10%.	Understanding typical cycle time while excluding unusually fast and slow items
Forecasting	Removes only the slowest items. At 80th percentile, keeps the fastest 80% of items.	Predicting delivery dates by excluding slow outliers that would make forecasts unreliable

Example: with 10 items sorted by cycle time as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15 days at the 80th percentile:

• Balanced keeps items 2-9
• Forecasting keeps items 1-8

Chart

The Cycle Time Analysis Chart groups completed work items by story points and shows average cycle time for each group.

• X-axis — Story point categories, plus "No Story Points" and "Overall"
• Y-axis — Average cycle time in days
• Overall — Average cycle time across all included work items

Hover a bar to see its average cycle time and how many work items it holds. The chart always groups by story points, whatever the team's sizing method.

Use the chart to answer questions like:

• Do similarly sized items have similar cycle times?
• Are large estimates taking meaningfully longer than smaller estimates?
• What is the average cycle time across the selected work?

Work Items Grid

Below the chart, a sortable and filterable grid shows the included work items with columns for Key, Title, Type, Status, Status Category, Story Points, Team, Sprint, Parent Key, Parent, Assigned To, Project, Tags, Activated, Done, and Cycle Time (Days), sorted by most recently done. Effort and Size are available from Choose Columns.

Applying grid filters dynamically updates the chart. This lets you drill into cycle time by work type, sprint, assignee, team, or other dimensions.

Using Cycle Time

Use the report to:

• Track trends — Run the report regularly to see whether cycle time is improving
• Compare estimates — Check whether items with similar story points complete in similar time
• Identify bottlenecks — Investigate items with unusually long cycle times
• Forecast delivery — Use the Forecasting method at a percentile such as 85% to estimate likely completion ranges
• Tune WIP limits — High cycle times can indicate too much work in progress

How To Open The Report

Team Cycle Time

1. Navigate to the team's detail page
2. Open Reports > Cycle Time
3. Configure the date range and filters

Employee Cycle Time

1. Navigate to the employee's detail page
2. Open Reports > Cycle Time
3. Configure the date range and filters