Cycle Time Percentile Report
What is Cycle Time Percentile?
Cycle Time Percentile is a powerful metric that shows you the distribution of your team’s delivery speed. Instead of just looking at an average, which can be easily skewed by a few long-running tickets, percentiles tell you what percentage of your tickets are completed within a specific timeframe.
For example, a 95th percentile for Cycle Time of 5 days means that 95% of your tickets are completed in 5 days or less. This provides a much more accurate and insightful view of your team's typical performance.
Why Use Percentiles Instead of an Average?
While a simple average can be useful for small teams, it can be misleading for larger organizations. As research has shown, the distribution of developer cycle time often follows a "hockey-stick" pattern, where most tickets are completed quickly, but a few outliers take a much longer time. An average can be easily thrown off by these outliers, making your team look slower than it is.
What each percentile means (with why it matters)
P50 (median cycle time): Typical case. If this is high, most work is slow → could point to process friction (too many handoffs, unclear scope).
P75: A quarter of work takes longer than this. If the gap to P50 is big, it shows inconsistent execution (some PRs are small, others balloon).
P90: The tail of slower deliveries. High values usually mean bottlenecks (waiting for review, blocked dependencies).
P95: Worst 5% of cases. If extreme, it highlights outliers (massive PRs, priority shifts, neglected tickets).
How Typo Calculates Cycle Time Percentile
1. Data Collection
Typo pulls data from your integrated tools to create a complete and accurate history of your PRs.
2. Calculation Logic
For every merged PR within the selected date range, Typo calculates its total cycle time—from the 'First Commit' till its 'Merged'.
All of these cycle time values are then sorted in ascending order. From this sorted list, Typo calculates the values for different percentiles (e.g., 50th, 70th, 90th, and 95th).
For example, if you have 100 PRs, the 90th percentile is the cycle time of the 90th ticket on the sorted list.
3. Widgets
PR Cycle Time
PR Coding time
Pickup Time
Review Time
Merge Time
PR Size
Once we filter the data on the basis of top selected percentile - you can see the rest of the mertics for these PRs gicing you a more efficient look at the metrics excluding those anamolies.
How to Use Cycle Time Percentiles in Your Reports
By using percentiles, you can move beyond a single average and gain a deeper understanding of your team's performance.
Identify Bottlenecks: A high value for the 95th percentile can indicate that some PRs are getting stuck and need attention.
Set Realistic Goals: The 70th or 90th percentile provides a more meaningful and achievable target for your team than a simple average.
Improve Efficiency: Use the data to identify and address issues in your workflow that are causing delays for a small number of PRs, which can have a big impact on overall productivity.
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