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# Value Stream Analytics **(PREMIUM)**
> - [Introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/196455) in [GitLab Premium](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/) 12.9 at the group level.
Value Stream Analytics measures the time spent to go from an
[idea to production](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/08/05/continuous-integration-delivery-and-deployment-with-gitlab/#from-idea-to-production-with-gitlab)
(also known as cycle time) for each of your projects or groups. Value Stream Analytics displays the median time
spent in each stage defined in the process.
Value Stream Analytics can help you quickly determine the velocity of a given
group. It points to bottlenecks in the development process, enabling management
to uncover, triage, and identify the root cause of slowdowns in the software development life cycle.
For information on how to contribute to the development of Value Stream Analytics, see our [contributor documentation](../../../development/value_stream_analytics.md).
Group-level Value Stream Analytics is available via **Group > Analytics > Value Stream**.
[Project-level Value Stream Analytics](../../analytics/value_stream_analytics.md) is also available.
## Default stages
The stages tracked by Value Stream Analytics by default represent the [GitLab flow](../../../topics/gitlab_flow.md). These stages can be customized in Group Level Value Stream Analytics.
- **Issue** (Tracker)
- Time to schedule an issue (by milestone or by adding it to an issue board)
- **Plan** (Board)
- Time to first commit
- **Code** (IDE)
- Time to create a merge request
- **Test** (CI)
- Time it takes GitLab CI/CD to test your code
- **Review** (Merge Request/MR)
- Time spent on code review
- **Staging** (Continuous Deployment)
- Time between merging and deploying to production
## Filter the analytics data
> [Introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/13216) in GitLab 13.3
GitLab provides the ability to filter analytics based on the following parameters:
- Milestones (Group level)
- Labels (Group level)
- Author
- Assignees
To filter results:
1. Select a group.
1. Click on the filter bar.
1. Select a parameter to filter by.
1. Select a value from the autocompleted results, or type to refine the results.
Each stage of Value Stream Analytics is further described in the table below.
| **Stage** | **Description** |
| --------- | --------------- |
| Issue | Measures the median time between creating an issue and taking action to solve it, by either labeling it or adding it to a milestone, whatever comes first. The label will be tracked only if it already has an [Issue Board list](../../project/issue_board.md) created for it. |
| Plan | Measures the median time between the action you took for the previous stage, and pushing the first commit to the branch. The very first commit of the branch is the one that triggers the separation between **Plan** and **Code**, and at least one of the commits in the branch needs to contain the related issue number (e.g., `#42`). If none of the commits in the branch mention the related issue number, it is not considered to the measurement time of the stage. |
| Code | Measures the median time between pushing a first commit (previous stage) and creating a merge request (MR) related to that commit. The key to keep the process tracked is to include the [issue closing pattern](../../project/issues/managing_issues.md#closing-issues-automatically) to the description of the merge request (for example, `Closes #xxx`, where `xxx` is the number of the issue related to this merge request). If the closing pattern is not present, then the calculation takes the creation time of the first commit in the merge request as the start time. |
| Test | Measures the median time to run the entire pipeline for that project. It's related to the time GitLab CI/CD takes to run every job for the commits pushed to that merge request defined in the previous stage. It is basically the start->finish time for all pipelines. |
| Review | Measures the median time taken to review the merge request that has a closing issue pattern, between its creation and until it's merged. |
| Staging | Measures the median time between merging the merge request with a closing issue pattern until the very first deployment to a [production environment](#how-the-production-environment-is-identified). If there isn't a production environment, this is not tracked. |
How this works, behind the scenes:
1. Issues and merge requests are grouped together in pairs, such that for each
`<issue, merge request>` pair, the merge request has the [issue closing pattern](../../project/issues/managing_issues.md#closing-issues-automatically)
for the corresponding issue. All other issues and merge requests are **not**
considered.
1. Then the `<issue, merge request>` pairs are filtered out by last XX days (specified
by the UI - default is 90 days). So it prohibits these pairs from being considered.
1. For the remaining `<issue, merge request>` pairs, we check the information that
we need for the stages, like issue creation date, merge request merge time,
You can change the name of a project environment in your GitLab CI/CD configuration.
## Example workflow
Below is a simple fictional workflow of a single cycle that happens in a
single day through all noted stages. Note that if a stage does not include a start
and a stop time, its data is not included in the median time. It is assumed that
milestones are created and a CI for testing and setting environments is configured.
a start and a stop mark, it is not measured and hence not calculated in the median
time. It is assumed that milestones are created and CI for testing and setting
environments is configured.
1. Issue is created at 09:00 (start of **Issue** stage).
1. Issue is added to a milestone at 11:00 (stop of **Issue** stage / start of
**Plan** stage).
1. Start working on the issue, create a branch locally and make one commit at
12:00.
1. Make a second commit to the branch which mentions the issue number at 12.30
(stop of **Plan** stage / start of **Code** stage).
1. Push branch and create a merge request that contains the [issue closing pattern](../../project/issues/managing_issues.md#closing-issues-automatically)
in its description at 14:00 (stop of **Code** stage / start of **Test** and
**Review** stages).
1. The CI starts running your scripts defined in [`.gitlab-ci.yml`](../../../ci/yaml/README.md) and
takes 5min (stop of **Test** stage).
1. Review merge request, ensure that everything is OK and merge the merge
request at 19:00. (stop of **Review** stage / start of **Staging** stage).
1. Now that the merge request is merged, a deployment to the `production`
environment starts and finishes at 19:30 (stop of **Staging** stage).
From the above example you can conclude the time it took each stage to complete
as long as their total time:
- **Issue**: 2h (11:00 - 09:00)
- **Plan**: 1h (12:00 - 11:00)
- **Code**: 2h (14:00 - 12:00)
- **Test**: 5min
- **Review**: 5h (19:00 - 14:00)
- **Staging**: 30min (19:30 - 19:00)
A few notes:
- In the above example we demonstrated that it doesn't matter if your first
commit doesn't mention the issue number, you can do this later in any commit
of the branch you are working on.
- You can see that the **Test** stage is not calculated to the overall time of
the cycle since it is included in the **Review** process (every MR should be
tested).
- The example above was just **one cycle** of the seven stages. Add multiple
cycles, calculate their median time and the result is what the dashboard of
