Overview

Epic Lead Time is defined as the median epic duration, which is calculated as the difference in time from when the epic is created, through to when the epic is closed. This is calculated week over week by when the epic is closed and plotted in the trendline. The top level metric is the median of all epics that were closed within the time range set by the time picker.

****📄 The time is broken down into three components:

Plan: the duration of time between when the epic is created and when the first development action takes place (e.g., a work item moves to In Progress or a PR is created that is linked to an issue in the epic).

Dev: the duration of time from the first activity through to the last development activity (e.g., a work item closes or final PR activity)

Close: the duration of time from the last development activity to when the Epic is closed.

For all epics that were closed within the range selected in the time picker, this metric calculates the median Plan, Dev, and Close Durations. This data can help organizations get a sense of which phase of development is taking the longest time.

💡 If Plan is the longest, it could indicate that creating requirements takes more time than expected, or that the engineering team has such a long backlog that they don’t get to the work until later than expected.

If Dev is significantly longer than expected, it could mean that the requirements were unclear, requiring back and forth between Product / Design / UXUI / etc., to scope out what is actually to be built.

If Close is longer than expected, this could indicate that there are some final trailing blockers or items that are preventing the team from simply closing out the epic.

Breakdown

Epics can have significantly varying size and effort. This table helps to give context for what could delay an epic in any of the phases described above.

Key questions to ask using this data

• How long does it really take to plan and deliver a new feature?
• Are there bottlenecks in our planning or development process that make this process slower than it needs to be - perhaps because of unclear requirements
• Are we speeding up or slowing down in delivering our commitments?

Open Epics

The above metrics focus entirely upon Epics that were closed within the duration of time selected with the time picker. However it can also be useful to see what other Epics are currently open and in-flight.

Some may be ongoing epics that are used to capture work that never has a finite end, like a “Customer Support” epic or “General Bugs and Polish." Others are epics that are currently in progress in one state or another. This can help give a sense of what a specific set of people are currently working on (and even suggest places to do some clean-up efforts).

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Why is X Epic showing for this team? An epic will appear for a team or teams if any individual IC on that team had effort towards an epic. For some highly cross-functional teams, this may be a small bit of effort across many epics. To gain further insight around this, we recommend heading over to the Plan page to gain insight into what that team worked on during specific time periods.