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Percentile benchmarks

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Percentile benchmarks are reference points for metrics based on Flow customer data. Use these percentiles to understand how your organization compares to other Flow customers, to help you identify potential areas of growth.

How were the percentile benchmarks calculated?

Flow’s percentile benchmarks were calculated using Flow customer data from the 2023 calendar year including:

  • 274 organizations
  • 33,000 commit authors
  • 8.8 million commits
  • 2.5 million merged PRs
  • 2.2 million completed tickets

From this data, the metrics that have percentile benchmarks were aggregated at the organization level, resulting in one annual value per metric per organization.

For most time-based PR metrics, PRs with 0 values for the metric were excluded from the calculation. For Iterated PRs, PRs with an iteration time of 0 were included in the calculation.

Skewness was within normal limits for each metric dataset, and, as such, there was no need to exclude outliers.

Once these annual values were achieved for each metric, we plotted a distribution of the values for each metric per organization. From this distribution we identified the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile for each metric.

In most cases, the 75th percentile represents a higher metric value. In some cases, usually for time-based PR metrics, the 75th percentile is inverted to represent a lower metric value, since for most software delivery practices it’s preferred to have lower values for time-based metrics, within certain limits. This makes it easier to use and understand the percentiles across multiple metrics at once.

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How to use percentile benchmarks

These percentiles show the metric's value that x% (25, 50, or 75) of organizations measure at.

Use these as a starting point to understand how you compare to other organizations. Remember that these percentiles do not define what is good or bad for each metric—they represent the proportion of organizations above and below each threshold.

Consider your context to decide what percentiles are 'best' for your organization and needs.

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Finding percentile benchmarks in Flow

The percentiles for the following metrics are available in Flow:

For applicable metrics, use the Percentiles chart option in Team health insights to display the percentiles for that metric. Toggling on this chart option applies only to your view of Flow and does not enable percentiles for other users.  

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