During AgileCE conference I had a discussion with Robert Dempsey about measuring lead time. I never really thought much about the way we count lead time in our team and talk with Robert triggered some doubts.
What We Measure
As you already know on our Kanban board we have backlog, todo queue, several steps describing our development and deployment process and finally done station.
OK, so when do we stamp the starting date for the feature? We do it when the card goes from todo queue into design station, which is the very first column in our development process.
When do we stamp ending date then? You may take your best guess and um… you’ll be wrong. No, not when the sticky note is moved to done column. Actually we mark ending date when a feature makes its way to live column which is third station from the right.
And this is different from what you may have heard from Kanban gurus out there. Don’t blame me, I’ve already told you thought-leaders don’t know it all.
What we measure is time which passes before we start actual work on feature to the moment it goes live.
What We Don’t Measure
What is left behind then? First and the most important thing is the time feature spends in todo queue waiting for some developer to become free and start working on it. If you were trained by the father of Kanban – David Anderson – you’ve probably heard something different but stay with me, I have a good explanation. Or so I guess.
Another thing which is left outside is the last part of our process. There is documentation station where we (surprise, surprise) update documentation. This is done after pushing new version to production.
It looks like we cut something on both ends to make our lead times look better, doesn’t it? Anyway what we gather as lead time doesn’t really describe time which passes from the moment of decision to build the feature to the moment it is done-done. Thus another question arises.
Why, Oh Why?
The way we measure lead time came in natural way but chat with Robert forced me to make some explanation up to justify our practice.
Time Spent in Todo Queue
We left time spent in todo queue out basically because content of this station is changing pretty often. Sometimes feature lives there just for a day or so just to go back to backlog when priorities change. And believe me they do change every now and then. Sometimes a feature stays in todo queue for a longer time as it is always pushed to the second or third place because, well, priorities change.
There is another reason too. The basic reasoning for adding time spent in todo queue to lead time is that you should be able to tell your customer how long it would take from the day 0 (when they tell you they want the feature) to the moment they get it in production. It is pretty rare case when developers are able to start working on a new feature immediately so it is natural that some delay will appear when feature is waiting for a free developer.
I’m not convinced though. Actually very much depends on additional circumstances. The feature the client is asking for may be the only high priority thing to do at the moment but it is pretty unlikely. If the client asks just for one feature lead time will be different than if they asked about a list of ten features. If you have limit of 3 in todo queue you would need to put 7 features in backlog anyway and time they spend in backlog won’t be measured.
If you have a few clients and you need to balance your workload among them it becomes even more complicated since product owner (or whoever is your priority setter) has to decide which feature can be put on the top of the todo queue, which can occupy second or third place and which has to go into backlog.
Basically in any situation but the simplest measuring time spent in todo queue wouldn’t help us much and that’s why we decided to exclude it from lead time.
Time Spent on Documentation
With documentation the situation is a bit different. Documentation isn’t a real part of our product. We create it for our internal reasons – to make life of our sys admin easier and to avoid problems if he was hit by the bus. This means that, from client perspective, our product is complete as soon as it goes live. Even though we have to do some housekeeping later it doesn’t affect our ability to deliver.
Theoretically it might be a problem if documentation phase would be time-consuming and would steal time we’d prefer to spend for something else, namely deployment or testing. However looking at the past in the team it isn’t a problem so we may safely throw documentation out of lead time.
The next thing is using lead time to create some estimates but that’s the subject for another post.
If you liked this post you should like the whole Kanban Story too.
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