I'd like to extract a task (issue) cycle time from my project and explore how they can be visualized in meaningful and helpful ways. Is this information possible to retrieve from the github API? After spending some time in the docs, I can't find this information available. Here are the available endpoints: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/overview/endpoints-available-for-github-apps
It seems there's isn't a cycle time (process time) value, how can I retrieve it?
I think you've hit the nail on the head by wanting to do this using the GitHub API, instead of needing to rely on any inaccurate metrics from project management tools like Jira. It's definitely possible to extract meaningful software engineering metrics from GitHub, but the easiest way is to use a commercial service to do this.
Haystack Analytics offers a commercial service that allows you to extract Cycle Time. That Cycle Time can then be broken down into Development Time and Review Time (which in turn can then be broken down into First Response Time, Rework Time and Idle Completion Time). You can track the other DevOps Four Key Metrics (as mentioned in the Accelerate DevOps book) in Haystack too.
Google Cloud Platform have also open-sourced a self-hosted tool on GitHub that allows you to extract the Four Key Metrics from Git data. Do note that this tool contains a number of limitations and the metrics might not work with your use-case out of the box.
