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Key features of the Cycle time trend chart
The Cycle Time Trend chart is part of the Agile Cycle Time Chart app and shows real-time insights into how the cycle time for the selected scope changes over time. The chart helps you track and explain delivery trends over time to identify bottlenecks, detect outliers, ensure stability for confidentforecasting, and support continuous improvement.
The Cycle time trend report supports various timeframes (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, etc., or custom), and highlights median, 85th percentile, and 95th percentile cycle times to spot anomalies or performance shifts. With comprehensive configuration options, you can tailor the view to your needs and drill down into each segment to explore detailed statistics and the underlying work items.
⚙️ Current Settings (can be customized):
Data source - 5 Jira projects
Interval - last 6 bi-weeks
Grouping - bi-weekly
Selected issues state - completed issues
Statistical metrics - median, 85th percentile, and 95th percentile
Cycle time trend chart example on Jira dashboard
📊 How to read the chart:
The Cycle time trend chart above visualizes completed issues grouped by the last 6 bi-weekly timeframes (1️⃣). Once a particular interval is selected (2️⃣), key statistics for that period - median, 85th percentile, and 95th percentile (3️⃣) - are highlighted to reveal patterns and outliers in team performance. The statistics data (4️⃣) includes the trend, cycle time, and total issue count (5️⃣). The issue list (6️⃣) is automatically filtered based on the selected statistics item to show only issues completed during the selected timeframe. This gives you a granular look at the data behind each trend point.
By highlighting shifts and patterns, the Cycle time trend graph in Jira dashboard becomes your lens into delivery dynamics - clear, visual, and continuously updated.
How different roles use the Cycle time trend report
✅ Scrum Master / Agile Coach: I use the Cycle time trend chart to detect delivery slowdowns, outliers, and gradual changes in delivery pace over time. It helps me understand whether process changes are improving or hurting delivery stability, spot when we're slowing down sprint by sprint, revisit WIP limits if needed, and bring concrete data to team discussions and retrospectives.
✅ Project Manager: I rely on the Cycle time trend to communicate delivery performance to stakeholders. It backs up my forecasts with real-time numbers, so I don’t have to rely on assumptions or gut feel when setting expectations.
✅ Release Train Engineer (SAFe) / Program Manager: With dozens of teams and a shared release schedule, I use the trend of cycle time in Agile teams to compare teams' performance and spot potential risks early. It helps align long-term delivery expectations with real team output.
Uncover hidden delivery trends and take control with the Cycle time trend chart!
1. Key feature: Cycle time trend lines with percentile insights
To understand how your delivery pace evolves over time, it’s not enough to look at a single average. The Cycle time trend chart visualizes multiple percentiles lines, such as 50% (median), 85%, and 95%, to help you see how typical, slow, and extreme cases change across sprints.
By tracking percentile-based trends, you can identify shifts in performance, detect delivery risks early, and understand how predictable your process really is.
Cycle time trend lines with percentiles chart explained
Cycle time trend lines with percentiles chart example
1️⃣ Select percentiles to display: use the Statistics dropdown in the top-right to toggle between different metrics. The most useful for delivery analysis are:
Median (50 %) - your “typical” cycle time
85 % & 95 % percentiles - show 85% and 95% of your completed work items took less than or equal to that number of days:
95th percentile on the Cycle time trend graph explained
2️⃣ Understand the legend: the chart doesn’t just show a single delivery trend line - it visualizes your performance across multiple percentiles, giving you a layered view of speed, consistency, and risk.
Each trend line reflects how many percent of completed items met a certain delivery time threshold:
50% (Median): Half of your work items were delivered in this number of days or fewer.
85%: Shows how long it took to complete the majority of tasks - useful for tracking broader delivery consistency.
95%: Marks the upper bound where nearly all work (95%) is done - a practical threshold for setting stakeholder expectations and forecasting with confidence.
3️⃣ Spot changes over time: each data point reflects the cycle time value for the selected percentile in a given time interval. In this example, you can quickly see where the 95 % line spikes - a potential bottleneck or delay.
💡 Pro tip: Сlick timeline to make deeper analysis of breakdowns or check specific work items.
Why this Distribution-based perspective matters
This distribution-based view helps you:
Understand delivery consistency - the flatter the trend line, the more consistent your delivery.
Detect delivery anomalies early, such as spikes or dips in longer tasks, without skewing insights with simple averages.
Improve process reliability by identifying and addressing variability across sprints, projects, or teams.
2. Key feature: Multiple teams' cycle time trend analysis in Jira Dashboard
If you're managing delivery across multiple teams, Jira projects, or Scrum/Kanban boards, the Cycle time trend graph helps you track delivery progress in a single combined view:
Multiple teams' cycle time trend analysis in Jira Dashboard
With the Cycle time trend gadget, you can explore breakdowns by Jira projects (1️⃣), work item types (2️⃣), or any other Jira field - all fully configurable. This helps you reveal hidden patterns during the selected time interval.
For each breakdown segment, you'll see (3️⃣):
Issue count - the number of completed issues in that segment
Cycle time - total time taken, based on your configuration
Trend - percentage change in cycle time over time, showing whether delivery is accelerating or slowing down
3. Key feature: Cycle time trend target lines
Add custom target lines directly to your Cycle time trend chart to track value delivery goals and KPIs. Targets act as a threshold that makes it easy to see how your current performance aligns with expectations.
Cycle time trend chart with target lines explained
Cycle time trend chart example with target lines
1️⃣ Open the “Targets” menu in the top right of your chart. 2️⃣ Add a target name, value, and choose a color for visibility. 3️⃣ The chart will display a horizontal line representing your benchmark, making it easy to:
Compare actual performance to long-term goals
Monitor consistency or improvement over time
Identify projects, initiatives, epics, etc., that deviate from expectations
4️⃣ The same target is shown in the breakdown table for each project, helping you assess which one is consistently hitting the goal and where support may be needed.
Target lines help you turn cycle time trends into actionable insights, showing which teams consistently meet goals and where performance needs attention.
Why use delivery trend target lines
Target lines help you define and visualize what “success” looks like, such as staying below a 7-day median or maintaining delivery stability. Use them to:
Set KPIs
Track the cycle time change over time about a fixed target - a flat line that represents your delivery goal
Support continuous improvement conversations with hard data
4. Key feature: Flexible filtering in Jira cycle time trend report
To make your cycle time analysis more actionable, use the Issue filter panel to refine the report by specific work dimensions.
Cycle time trend chart filtering explained
Flexible filtering in Jira cycle time trend chart
1️⃣ Estimation field: Focus on specific estimate ranges (like story points) to refine your team’s estimation process.
2️⃣ Issue type: Include or exclude work item types like tasks, bugs, or stories for more granular insight.
3️⃣ Epics: Narrow the scope to a particular epic to evaluate cycle time within a focused context.
4️⃣ Exclude issues: Remove irrelevant items (outliers) that might skew your analysis.
5️⃣ JQL filter: Apply custom logic for advanced filtering directly from Jira.
These filters help you drill down into meaningful slices of your data instead of analyzing broad, averaged metrics.
5. Key feature: Estimation-based issue filtering
To help you improve the estimation process, especially in story points, the chart supports filtering by the Estimation field, allowing you to analyze delivery patterns across different levels of effort.
You can apply filters based on Story points or, optionally, by other numeric fields such as Time spent. This lets you validate how accurately estimates reflect real delivery time, and where adjustments may be needed.
Estimation-based issue filtering explained
Go to “Issue filter” → “Estimation filed”
Apply estimation ranges (e.g., 1-3 story points) to isolate trends by complexity
The selected estimation field is automatically added to the issue list for quick comparison
Estimation-based issue filtering on the Cycle time trend chart example
Gain insights into:
Which cycle or lead time is associated with more complex issues.
Planning the simple tasks based on past trends.
In which status issues with the most common estimates are getting stuck.
What about the native Jira Cycle time trend chart
Jira doesn’t include a native Cycle time trend gadget that can help you track delivery pace over time with real percentile-based statistics or flexible breakdowns.
There’s no built-in way in Jira to track percentile-based cycle times (e.g., median, 85th or 95th percentile), visualize delivery trends, or explore performance shifts using advanced breakdowns. While Jira offers basic control chart functionality, it lacks trend analysis, drill-down capabilities, and multi-team comparisons - all essential for real-world Kanban and Agile workflows.
With the Cycle time trend chart, you can:
Visualize historical cycle time trends across multiple projects or teams
Track delivery patterns using median, 85th, and 95th percentiles
Use detailed breakdowns by project, issue type, or any Jira field
Align insights with team goals using custom target lines and statistics
Advantages of using the Cycle time trend report
Here’s what the Cycle time trend report in Jiraenables you to do:
Track performance stability: Quickly see if your team is trending toward faster or slower delivery and maintain long-term consistency.
Improve the estimation process: Discover how different story point estimates correlate with delivery time, task complexity, and workflow blockers.
Validate process improvements: Whether you’ve changed WIP limits or workflows, compare before/after trends to measure actual impact.
Catch issues early: Detect gradual increases in cycle time and act before they become bottlenecks.
Run insight-driven retrospectives: Use trend data instead of guesswork to facilitate more grounded team discussions.
Forecast smarter: Spot delivery slowdowns or improvements and set better expectations with stakeholders and product owners.
Apps used in this Cycle time trend chart example
Explore real Jira Dashboard scenarios using our examples to shape your own reporting cases.
Both Jira plugins used in these examples featured below offer a 30-day free trial and are entirely free for teams of up to 10 users:
The Agile Reports and Gadgets app includes Cycle time trend chartcapabilities along with a wide range of additional reports and charts.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is a Cycle time trend?
A cycle time trend is a visual report that shows how the time required to complete tasks or processes changes over a defined period. It helps teams monitor delivery pace, detect performance shifts, and assess the impact of process improvements across sprints, weeks, months, or quarters etc. This long-term view is ideal for spotting patterns, identifying bottlenecks, and supporting continuous improvement efforts.
2. How to track the cycle time trend?
To track cycle time trend, use a chart that visualizes how the cycle time evolves, grouped by days, weeks, or custom intervals. The most accurate way is to visualize percentile-based cycle times (like median, 85th, and 95th percentiles) and monitor them across consistent timeframes. This helps you identify whether delivery performance is improving, stable, or declining. Tools like the Agile Cycle Time Chart for Jira enable you to do this directly on your dashboard with real-time data, flexible filters, and breakdowns by team, work item type, or project.
3. How to visualize the cycle time trend per team in Jira?
To visualize cycle time trends per team, add multiple Cycle time trend gadgets from the Agile Cycle Time Chart app to your Jira Dashboard - one per team. This setup is especially useful if your teams are grouped into a larger program or Agile Release Train. You’ll be able to see each team’s delivery pace independently and analyze aggregated trends side by side. It helps track consistency, detect outliers, and compare performance over time without switching views.
4. What issue states can be analyzed in the Cycle time trend report in Jira dashboard?question
The Cycle time trend report allows you to analyze how long issues spend in different states by selecting one of the available sets:
Completed issues – focus on issues that reached a done status.
Status-changed issues – include issues that transitioned between statuses during the selected period.
Created issues – track items that were created within the timeframe.
Open issues – show issues that were in progress or unresolved.
This flexibility helps you tailor your analysis to different reporting goals: from measuring completion pace to monitoring ongoing or transitioning work.
5. How is cycle time calculated in the Cycle time trend chart?
The Cycle time trend chart calculates cycle time based on the time elapsed between selected status transitions. You can configure:
Calculation metric - cycle time or lead time
When to start the timer (e.g., any in progress category statuses)
When to pause or stop the timer (e.g., any done category statuses)
Whether to calculate based on duration or calendar, and configure the work schedule
This flexibility ensures the calculation reflects your actual delivery flow and working time, so you can accurately analyze trends over time.
How does the issue filter work in the Cycle time trend report?
The Issue filter in the Cycle time trend report lets you narrow down the data to the most relevant items. You can filter issues by:
Estimation field value range (e.g., story points)
Issue types (e.g., stories, bugs, tasks)
One or multiple epics
Exclude issues option
JQL queries for advanced filtering logic
This allows you to build targeted views - whether you're focusing on a specific epic, filtering by estimation ranges or issue types, excluding irrelevant items, or applying advanced logic via JQL.
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