Lead time chart

Key features of the Lead time chart

The Lead time chart helps Agile teams measure the total time it takes for work items to move through the entire delivery process, from issue creation to completion.

Lead time histogram, Lead time trend, and Time in Status work together to give you a complete view of delivery performance, helping you spot patterns and delays, track changes in value delivery over time, and uncover where work gets stuck across workflow stages. All three are part of the Agile Cycle Time Chart app, built to turn raw Jira data into clear, actionable request-to-delivery timeline insights.

Lead Time Chart for Jira helps to:

• Track how long it takes to deliver work from the moment it’s created
• Detect outliers, bottlenecks, and long-tail issues across delivery timelines
• Monitor trends in value delivery pace over time to evaluate process changes
• Analyze stage-level breakdowns to uncover workflow inefficiencies
• Define and refine SLA targets and team-level lead time KPIs based on real delivery data

The Lead time chart on your Jira dashboard provides real-time visibility into your workflow using existing Jira data, with customizable settings and breakdowns by priority, epic, release, and more.

How do different roles use the Lead time report

✅ Scrum Master: As a Scrum Master, I use the Lead time histogram to identify delivery inconsistencies from the moment an issue is created. It helps surface delays across the entire workflow - from backlog to done - enabling better retrospectives and process tuning.

✅ Product Manager: As a Product Manager, I rely on the Lead time trend chart to monitor how delivery time changes over time, from initial request to completion. It helps me evaluate the impact of scope, team load, or process changes and keep stakeholders aligned.

✅ Release Train Engineer (SAFe): As a Release Train Engineer, I use the Time in status chart to detect where work stalls within the process. I pay close attention to waiting statuses like "Dev Done" or "Waiting for Stakeholder" - so I can remove blockers and accelerate flow across teams.

✅ Support Lead: As a Support Lead, I use both the Lead time Histogram and Trend chart to monitor how fast we resolve issues, from the moment a bug or support ticket is created. This is essential when working under SLAs or prioritizing bugs based on urgency and customer impact.

From Jira ticket creation to resolution - stay in control with Lead Time Chart!

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1. Key feature: Agile lead time analysis across multiple teams

When managing several teams - whether in a single project or across an Agile Release Train - it's useful to add multiple lead time charts to the same Jira Dashboard. This gives you a clear view of how delivery timelines vary between teams, while still allowing for deep dives into team-specific performance.

The Lead time chart example shown above displays data split by 1️⃣ Jira board (used to represent teams) and 2️⃣ types of work items. You can apply two-level breakdowns using any Jira field, such as priority, epic, release, and more, to tailor the charts to your reporting needs.

2. Key feature: Lead time distribution

Not all delays happen during development - some happen before work even starts.
The Lead time histogram reveals the distribution of completed work items, starting from issue creation to completion. The chart highlights not just execution speed but also process friction in planning, prioritization, and handoffs.

It groups issues into time-based bins (e.g. days, weeks, bi-weeks), providing a clear view of how long work items typically take to flow through your entire delivery system.

✅ Lead time distribution chart helps to:

• Understand value delivery consistency by visualizing the distribution of lead times - spot how predictable your process really is.
• Detect delays and outliers by drilling down into individual work items - identify blockers, bottlenecks, or one-off anomalies.
• Compare teams or work types using breakdowns by Jira fields like board, issue type, or custom fields - highlight process gaps across segments.
• Track request-to-delivery timelines by visualizing key percentiles (median, 85th, or custom) - monitor SLAs and manage stakeholder and customer expectations.
• Focus analysis on relevant data with flexible filtering by work type, release, epic, estimation field, or custom JQL - zoom in to what matters.
• Identify systematic inefficiencies by spotting long tails in your lead time distribution - address root causes, not just symptoms.

Explore the interactive Lead time histogram

Dive into a live, clickable example of the Lead Time Histogram chart. Open settings to adjust filters, test different configurations, and see how your cycle time data transforms in real time. Alongside the chart, you’ll find a detailed overview of all its features.

Try it now and uncover delivery insights your team can act on.

3. Key feature: Lead time trend line

The Lead time trend chart helps Agile teams monitor how long it takes to deliver value, from issue creation to resolution, and how that delivery time changes over time. The trendline based on the median (50th percentile) reflects the median lead time to turn a user-reported bug, priority issue, or internal requirement into a delivered solution.

It’s especially useful in development workflows where issues come with SLA commitments or business-critical expectations. By tracking the trend, you can monitor how consistently your team delivers fixes or features over time and spot when delivery times begin to slip.

By grouping completed issues into time intervals (e.g., bi-weekly), the chart visualizes whether your team is speeding up, slowing down, or staying consistent. This makes it easy to:

• Track delivery performance trends to evaluate if your team is improving
• Measure the impact of process changes, staffing shifts, or external events
• Compare actual lead times to your SLA or performance targets
• Share value delivery trends with stakeholders in a clear, visual format

Whether you're trying to reduce delays, validate recent improvements, or anticipate delivery risks, Lead time trend turns raw Jira data into an actionable timeline view, all calculated from the moment each issue is created.

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4. Lead time chart additional features

Waiting time across workflow stages analysis

The Time in Status chart helps teams understand where time is lost after active work ends by measuring how long issues stay in waiting statuses, where no progress happens, yet delivery is delayed.

By separating time into In Progress and Waiting groups, this chart shows where work gets stuck, enabling teams to:

• Detect invisible delays hidden in “done but not delivered” statuses
• Spot prolonged wait times that extend lead time even after development is finished
• Prioritize tickets that are technically done but still awaiting QA, review, or stakeholder input
• Streamline workflows by reducing idle hand-off time between active stages

Whether you're tracking SLA compliance or managing cross-functional handoffs, this chart turns status-level data into actionable insight, helping you deliver faster by acting before delays become bottlenecks.

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor

Whether you're configuring a Lead time histogram, Trend, or Time in status chart, any change you make is immediately reflected on the chart. Adjust a setting and see the result in real time - no tab switching, no reloads.

As you fine-tune the configuration, be it chart type, breakdowns, issue list, or global settings, the chart updates on the fly, so you always know what you’re getting.

Settings are organized into categories like Data source, Calculation, and Issue filter to help you stay focused.

Need more room to work? Just collapse the right-hand panel.
Once ready, you can save your chart as a gadget to any dashboard - or even create a new one right away without leaving the editor.

What about the native Jira lead time chart

There’s no native Jira lead time report available in Jira Dashboards out of the box. Instead, you can use the Control Chart, which tracks how long issues spend in a specific status category (typically reflecting Cycle Time, not Lead Time).

To approximate lead time, teams often rely on the time from issue creation to completion, but this requires careful workflow configuration, and even then:

• You can’t group results by time intervals (e.g., weekly, bi-weekly);
• You won’t see a trendline or SLA thresholds;
• There’s no visibility into waiting statuses or detailed breakdowns.

In contrast, the Agile Cycle Time Chart app by Broken Build offers full support for Lead Time analysis, including histograms, trendlines, waiting time detection, and deep filtering by issue fields or JQL.

Advantages of using the Lead time chart

• Add multiple Lead time gadgets to your Jira dashboard
• Understand how long it really takes to deliver work, from issue creation to completion
• Track delivery trends over time to see if your team is improving or slowing down
• Spot outliers and delivery variability with lead time distribution
• Break down delivery time by workflow stage to find where work gets stuck
• Distinguish between active work and waiting time to detect hidden delays
• Set realistic SLA targets using percentiles like the median or the 85th percentile
• Compare performance across teams, boards, or issue types using flexible filters
• Drill down into individual work items for root cause analysis
• Visualize progress clearly for stakeholders with trendlines and grouped timelines

Apps used in this Lead time chart example

Use the examples above to recreate similar use cases on your own Jira Dashboard.

Both Jira apps (plugins) featured in these examples offer a 30-day free trial and are completely free for teams of up to 10 users:

Agile Cycle Time Chart Agile Reports and Gadgets

The Agile Reports and Gadgets app also supports Lead time chart and includes a rich set of additional reports and chart types.