There are a number of great resources available explaining the methods for analyzing the information presented in this diagram.   Below if a listing of some of our favorites:

• Creating and Interpreting Cumulative Flow Diagrams
• Useful Agile Metrics – Cumulative Flow
• Managing Lean Software Development with Cumulative Flow Diagrams

Vewing the Cumulative Flow Diagram

To navigate to the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD), from the Board list page, click the Analytics icon associated with the Board that you wish to analyze.

The initial diagram presented in the analytics section is the Cumulative Flow Diagram.

The Cumulative Flow Diagram(or CFD) will be generated and presented with the default options. These options present the diagram with all lanes included and across the entire history of the Board.  Hovering over the diagram will display each of the included lanes as well as the current queue size for the aligned date. The chart also displays instances of WIP overrides.  This helps you to identify the Lanes and dates where work began to stack up and should provide clues into the process bottlenecks so that corrective actions can be taken.

Setting the Diagram Options

The Cumulative Flow Diagram provides multiple options that can be set that allow you to view the data from different perspectives and with different criteria.  After changing an options, you may click the Refresh Data button to regenerate the diagram using the new options.

Adding and Removing Lanes

You many wish to view the diagram without all the Lanes included in the dataset. You may remove Lanes from the dataset by clicking on these Lane headers with the Board representation located below the diagram.

Lanes can be added back by clicking on the Lane header again.  Any individual Lane may be removed or you may remove all Lanes underneath a parent lane by clicking on the parent Lane header.

Rolling Up Lanes

You may also want to calculate the CFD at a less granular level. For this, the ability to rollup Lanes to the their parent Lane is provided.  To do this, click on the Rollup icon located in the parent Lane header.  This will aggregate the total queue sizes of the child lanes into the selected parent Lane.  To unroll the child lanes, click the Unroll icon within the Lane header.  You may roll up any of the child Lanes into their parent Lane at any level of the hierarchy.

Selecting the Date Range

You may focus in on a specific date range using the date fields located directly underneath the diagram. With the fields, you may manually input the start and end dates or click the mini calendar located beside the date fields. 

Calculating Queue Size based on Card Size

LeanKit Kanban allows teams to specify the size value within a work item.  These Size values may represent any metric that your team uses to specify relative size of the work item.  These may be function points, use case points, or whatever unit of measurement that your team finds useful.  If your team is using the Size values to specify relative size of each work item, this metric may be more useful than the number of work items within a queue.  For these teams, LeanKit Kanban allows you to calculate the CFD queue sizes based on these sizes as opposed to the average queue size (number of work items within the queue).  To enable the option, simply click the "Calculate based on Card Size" option and refresh the graph data.  The graph will now calculate the queue size based on the size specified within the work item. Note that any work items that do not have a Size specified or have a Size of 0 (zero) will be considered with a size of 1(one) when calculating queue size.

Filtering By Card Type and Class of Service

You can filter the CFD by Card Type or Class of Service by selecting the ''By Card Type'' or ''By Class of Service'' tab. (The ''By Class of Service'' tab will only be visible if Class of Service is enabled for the board you are analyzing.)

When filtering, you will see the following choices below the main graph area:

Your configured card types (or Class of Service) will be shown as checkboxes, and you can include/exclude cards with that type from the CFD calculations by checking/unchecking the box.

Filtering By Card Tag

You can filter the CFD by Card Tags by entering a comma-separated list of tags as shown below.