Time in Status Chart

Where is the time going?

The chart breaks the cycle time of finished work items down by status, in three tabs: Distribution (how long work items stay in each status), Items (the work items with the longest cycle times, status by status) and Trend (how the time in each status changes from period to period). All three use the same work items.

Which work items count

The same as on the Cycle Time Chart: work items resolved within the time window that had started.

How time in status is calculated

For each work item, the chart looks only at the span from its first entry into an In Progress status to its resolution. Within that span it adds up the time spent in each status, including repeat visits. Every status counts, whatever its category: a To Do status the work item went back to, an intermediate Done status of a reopened work item, a status that no longer exists. Time in the backlog before the start and after the final resolution is not included. So for each work item, the times per status add up exactly to its cycle time.

A status's numbers come only from the work items that spent time in it. A work item that never visited a status does not count as zero there, so each status has its own number of work items.

Percentiles of different statuses do not add up: the 85th percentiles of all statuses together are not the 85th percentile of cycle time, because each is taken over different work items. Only the Items tab shows totals.

Distribution

One bar per status, sorted by the 85th percentile, longest first. Each bar starts at zero and ends at the 95th percentile; tick marks show the selected percentiles. The chart describes it as: "Each bar runs from 0 to the 95th percentile of the time work items spent in that status." It is not a box plot: the length from zero to a tick mark covers that share of the work items; the 85th percentile tick covers 85% of them.

Items

One bar per work item, split into its time per status; the whole bar is its cycle time. The segments follow the order in which the work item first entered each status, so the bar is not a timeline: time from a later return to a status sits in that status's first segment. The tab shows at most 20 work items, the longest first, and says so, for example "Showing 20 of 143 resolved work items, longest first." Click a status in the legend to hide or show it in this tab.

Trend

Work items are grouped by the period they were resolved in. Every period of the window is on the axis, also periods without finished work items: by day (2026-02-14), by week (the Monday, 2026-02-09) or by month (2026-02). For each period and status, the line shows the selected metric of the time spent in that status, by default the 85th percentile, over the work items resolved in that period that visited the status. A period in which no work item visited the status leaves a gap. So does a period with fewer than 5 such work items; its tooltip says "Too few work items (fewer than 5)". Otherwise the tooltip shows the value, the period and the number of work items.

Settings

"Initial view" sets the tab the chart opens with, for everyone who views the dashboard, so a dashboard on a wall display shows the tab you chose. Switching tabs while viewing changes only your own view and is not saved.

When the chart is empty

If no work item resolved in the window had started, the chart says: "No work to show: no work item resolved in this window had entered an In Progress status."

Opening work items

Click a bar in Distribution to open the work items behind it, a bar in Items to open that work item, and a point in Trend to open the work items behind it. As on every chart, more than 300 work items cannot be opened at once.