The Timing insights tab helps you to understand how long it takes to complete a task on average. The tab can also be helpful if you want to see how long individual tasks stay in each workflow state to find the bottlenecks in your process and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Drill down into the individual tasks

When you open the Timing insights tab, the first thing you’ll see is the Work in Progress chart that shows the tasks that your team is working on right now. The list is sorted so that the items that have been the longest in progress are shown on top.

Hover the cursor over the question mark to see all the steps that a task took so far, and how long it stayed in each workflow state:

The cycle time scatter plot shows how long it took to complete a task after the work was started. Each circle corresponds to a completed task. The higher the circle, the longer it took to complete the task. That allows you to visually see the outliers.

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 task stayed in that specific state is shown above the timeline, and the date when it arrived in that state is shown below.

Here’s an example of a slightly more complex workflow:

Looking at the above steps closely, you can see that on July 27th, the task moved from In review 🔍 back to Doing. 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 July 27th and eventually to Done.

Having this kind of information available helps you to see the problem areas and to take an action proactively.