Track lead and cycle times of individual tasks

In these last release notes for the year 2020, we wanted to highlight the new feature that allows tracking timings of individual tasks. That includes tracking lead and cycle times but also the amount of time a task has spent on any individual workflow state. That information is now available for all tasks, including those that are not yet completed.

Drilling in to the task details

When you drill into individual tasks by clicking through in any of your charts that provide click-throughs, you’ll notice there’s a question mark displayed for each item in the list.

When you hover a mouse over the question mark, a tooltip opens showing all the steps that the task took during its journey through the workflow, and how long it stayed in each workflow state:

Let’s take a closer look at that tooltip:

The task started from the Sprint backlog and progressed from Doing to Done👏. For each step, the time that the tasks stayed in that specific state is shown above the timeline, and the date when it arrived to that state is shown below. In this case, the task spent 3 days and 23 hours in the Sprint backlog before it was moved to the Doing state. It spent 3 days and 16 hours in Doing before it was moved to Done👏 on Dec 21st.

Since Screenful does not limit your workflow to any specific steps, you can see the steps of your own specific workflow. Here’s an example of a slightly more complex workflow:

In this case the workflow contains the steps Next Up, Sprint backlog, Doing, In review 🔍, Waiting for deployment, and Done 👏.

If you look at the above steps closely, you can see that on December 17th, the task moved from In review 🔍 back to Doing, and then back to In review 🔍 on December 24th. What could be the reason for that? This is an example of a task that failed the initial review and was assigned back to the developer for fixing. After the required fixes were done, it was moved to Waiting for deployment on Dec 17, and eventually to Done 👏 on Dec 22.