Cycle Time is an excellent way to gain an understanding of where in the release process your teams might be experiencing bottlenecks. Read on to dive deeper into the phases that make up this metric.
Phase 1: Dev
The Dev phase looks at how long the particular PR was in development. In order to capture this, Uplevel is looking at the time period from the first commit to when the PR is submitted for review. If you don't have any commits for a particular PR, your Dev time will be shown as 0 hours.
Phase 2: Waiting for Review
The Waiting for Review phase looks at how long a PR is waiting for a reviewer. It captures the time from when the PR is opened to the reply from the first reviewer. Keep an eye out for this section — it's common to see bottlenecks here.
Phase 3: Review
Review captures the time from the first reply from a reviewer to the time the PR is merged. If there is a lot of back and forth, this phase could be longer and might be an area to look into.
Phase 4: Release
This final, Release, phase captures the time after the PR is merged until it appears In a release branch. Note that these median times only include PRs released to the default branch in order to avoid double count PRs that move from the default branch to the release branch.