Delivery predictability

Delivery & investment

What it measures

Throughput stability: how consistent the weekly merged-PR volume is, expressed as a stability percentage derived from a rolling coefficient of variation (CV) over the prior four completed weeks. Higher means steadier — less week-to-week swing — which makes the team's output more forecastable.

A footnote also shows cycle-time tightness (p90/p50 ratio). A ratio close to 1.0 means most PRs take roughly the same time to merge; a high ratio means a long tail of slow PRs is pulling the p90 far above the median.

Why it matters

Teams that ship steadily are easier to plan around — stakeholders can commit to a cadence without heroics. Wild swings in weekly throughput (a feast-or-famine pattern) often signal batching, large blocking PRs, or review bottlenecks that smooth out with intentional process. This panel makes the variance visible before it becomes a planning problem.

How to read it

  • A stability % near 100 means very consistent output week to week; near 0 means high variance.
  • The rolling window needs four full completed weeks of history — early weeks in the report window may show as gaps while the window fills.
  • Read alongside Throughput: a stable low throughput and a stable high throughput both score well here. Stability is not the same as speed.
  • Cycle-time tightness in the footnote is complementary: a stable throughput with a loose p90/p50 means volume is steady but individual PR duration is unpredictable.

Anti-blame

A team-level aggregate. No author dimension exists in the stability score or the cycle-time tightness figure.

Common misreads

  • Steady does not mean fast — a team can be consistently slow and still score high stability. Read this panel next to Throughput and Cycle time, not in isolation.
  • A few early weeks in the report window show as gaps — the rolling four-week window has no data until four weeks have accumulated.
  • A short reporting window (under eight weeks) makes the stability score fragile — a single outlier week dominates the CV. Prefer longer windows for this panel.