What is Lead Time in Software Development?

Lead time is the measurement of how much time passes between task creation and when the work is completed. If you're focused on cycle time alone—that is, the time between when your team starts work on a feature and when it goes to the end users—you're seeing only a piece of the agile puzzle.

“Lead time” is a term borrowed from the manufacturing method known as Lean or Toyota Production System, where it is defined as the time elapsed between a customer placing an order and receiving the product ordered.

Translated to the software domain, lead time can be described more abstractly as the time elapsed between the identification of a requirement and its fulfillment. Defining a more concrete measurement depends on the situation being examined: for instance, when focusing on the software development process, the “lead time” elapsed between the formulation of a user story and that story being used “in production”, that is, by actual users under normal conditions.

Teams opting for the kanban approach favor this measure, over the better known velocity. Instead of aiming at increasing velocity, improvement initiatives intend to reduce lead time.

What is Cycle Time in Agile Development?

Cycle time is the “shelf life” of an item in your development plan – how long it takes a task to go from start to finish. In Scrum methodologies, you might think that cycle time is equal to sprint length, because tasks “start” at the beginning of the sprint and “end” when the sprint ends. However, this is not always true.

In reality, different tasks within a sprint may have different cycle times. In a two-week sprint, one task may be completed within one day, while another task might take 13 days to complete.

What is Takt Time?

Takt time is the average amount of time that passes between the beginnings of two successive product units being manufactured.

Example: Takt time is the maximum time within which all operations in the restaurant should be completed so as to meet their customer demand. In this case the takt time is 60/40 = 1.5 minutes. Takt time calculated by the formula available production time / demand during that period. This is the basics of lean manufacturing and this time can be considered as a target for improvement.

What is Takt Time in Agile Development?

Takt time measures how long it takes for a new product, version or feature to be released to your users. How often do you provide new value to your customers? In agile methodologies, takt time has dramatically increased, and most organizations are shipping releases every week, every day, or even multiple times a day.

What is Reaction Time?

Reaction time or response time refers to the amount of time that takes places between when we perceive something to when we respond to it.

What is Throughput Time?

Throughput time refers to the total amount of time that it takes to run a particular process in its entirety from start to finish. For example, a manufacturer can measure how long it takes to produce a product, from initial customer order to sourcing raw materials to manufacturing to sale.

Throughput time is the time between the moment the chef got the information to make the dishes and the moment the dishes are taken by waiter from dispatch area. That means its total time taken for movement of the raw material and information for producing one product. Throughput time includes all elements such as process time, inspection time, waiting time and material and information movement time, within the production process. Please note that the throughput time is measured between the start of the production and product dispatch. The elements happening before the start of the production and the elements happening after dispatch is not accounted in the throughput time, which is the main difference with lead time. Please keep this in mind. Normally the total time raw material waited in the warehouse waiting for the production also to be added to throughput time.