Tip of the day #16

Learn how to create a Cumulative Flow Diagram for your tasks. Yeah, this is not JAVA. It doesn’t matter if your team is not agile, if you want to grow in your career, you need to understand why your tasks are not going to production. Understand the blockers and act to remove it.

Cumulative Flow Diagram

A Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) is an area chart that shows the various statuses of work items for an application, version, or sprint. The horizontal x-axis in a CFD indicates time, and the vertical y-axis indicates cards (issues).

Each area of the graph represents a different status:

  • Backlog
  • To Do
  • In Progress
  • QA
  • Done

This list is not exhaustive, and you can customize the CFD to include additional statuses to reflect your team’s workflow.

Using/Reading a CFD

Let’s talk about the 3 key metrics that you can get from a CFD:

  • Throughput: The number of work items completed over a period of time. This is the area under the “Done” line.

  • Cycle Time: The average time it takes for a work item to be completed.

  • Work in Progress (WIP): The number of work items that are in progress at a given time. This is the area between the “To Do” and “Done” lines.

We want to increase throughput and decrease cycle time. One way to do this is to reduce WIP.

How to create a CFD and more

Today there is no repo again, but I will share with you a link to a great article about CFD and how to create it.

https://getnave.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-reading-the-cumulative-flow-diagram

https://djaa.com/lead-time-essential-metrics-download/

PT-BR video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7ACjqNK6bg (watch from the beginning)