---
title: "Trend builder"
canonical: "https://support.appfire.com/space/FD/3043394064/Trend%20builder"
format: markdown
---
> Macro (aura-html)
The stories you need to tell about your organization's progress can be complex and specific to how you work. Whether you're testing a new pilot program, evaluating the differences between teams, tracking a metric over time, or something unique to your team, you need a way to analyze how the changes you're investing in for your organization are actually driving impact.
Use Flow's Scenario builder to craft a custom story to illustrate change in your organization. The choice of what story to tell is up to you.
Below, you can watch an overview of the Trend builder report.
Catch process imbalances: video transcript
When you implement a new engineering initiative, you expect change—but data rarely moves in a single, perfect direction.
In this video, we're going to look at how Flow's Trend Builder helps you analyze the real-world trade-offs of a velocity push within the Appfire team over the last quarter.
Let’s start with our primary goal: reducing cycle time.
Looking at our first tile for Time to Merge, the data shows a massive win.
We see a significant 57.2% downward trend, dropping our average down to 3.1 days.
If you look at the graph, after an early January spike, our trendline steadily drops below our overall average, driving us down toward the 50th percentile benchmark of 1.9 days.
By all accounts, our team is shipping code much faster.
But as SEI leaders, we know that speed can sometimes come at the cost of quality.
By tiling "Thoroughly Reviewed PRs" right next to our velocity metric, we get our reality check.
Over the same period, we see a 17.1% downward trend in thorough reviews, hovering at an overall average of 60.5%.
While we're still safely above the 20% baseline benchmark shown on the graph, this tells us that as velocity ramped up, the depth of our peer reviews slightly cooled off.
To understand why reviews dipped, we look at our third tile: Responsiveness.
Remember, in Responsiveness, a downward trend is actually a positive — it means the time it takes to respond to comments is decreasing.
Here, we see a 14.8% drop in response time, averaging 13 hours and 46 minutes.
The graph shows a massive baseline improvement in late February, though it spiked again in March.
Synthesizing this data gives us a clear, actionable story for our next retro.
Our team is communicating faster and merging code in record time, but the velocity push might be causing engineers to favor quick approval loops over deep, exhaustive reviews.
Now, what if this data sparks a new question, and you want to expand your story?
Trend Builder allows you to add up to sixteen custom tiles.
By simply switching to a four-column layout and clicking Add metric tile, we can introduce a fourth dimension to our report, PR iteration time.
By bringing in PR iteration time, we can see exactly how long developers spend making code changes after a reviewer leaves comments, and the complete picture snaps into focus.
Look at this massive 69.5% downward trend.
Our team is spending significantly less time reworking code after a review.
When we look at this side-by-side with our other metrics, it tells a cohesive story: Because our Thorough Reviews went down slightly, reviewers are likely leaving fewer complex comments.
This means authors have less rework to do, which drastically shrinks our PR iteration time and ultimately drives that massive win in our Time to Merge.
Are automated tests catching the hard bugs early, or are we rubber-stamping code to move fast?
As an engineering leader, Trend Builder just gave you the exact data you need to ask the right questions in your next team retro.
Instead of jumping between multiple dashboards, Trend Builder lets you tile these metrics side-by-side to catch process imbalances early.
Best of all? This layout saves automatically, so you can monitor this balance week-over-week without rebuilding your report.
## Access and permissions
You need the **Scenario Builder Report** permission to access this report. You also need access to [Team health insights](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802141869).
To access the Trend builder report, go to **Reports** > **Reporting Trends** > **Scenario builder** > **Trend builder** tab.
## Choose a scenario
Before you start, think about what scenario you want to explore. You can start with the suggestions in the **Scenario recommendations** section, or create a specific scenario tailored to your needs.
In general, there are three main types of scenarios that the Scenario builder can help you explore:
- **Compare multiple teams**: See how a change affects the same metric across teams.
- **Compare several timeframes**: See how a team changes over different time periods.
- **Compare several metrics**: See how a change impacts multiple metrics for a team at once.
> 📝 When thinking of a scenario, it is best to change only one filter in each scenario tile and keep the others the same across tiles. This helps ensure your scenarios are free of other variables that might interfere with your analysis.
## Configure Scenario builder
### Add/Remove metric tiles
The scenario builder starts with two tiles for you to configure. Start by selecting the team, date range, and metric for each tile.
As needed, click **Add metric tile** button to add another tile to configure. You can add and configure up to sixteen tiles at a time.
Delete a tile by clicking the **X** in the upper-right corner of the tile. The first two tiles in the Scenario builder cannot be deleted.
### Change metric tile columns
You can customize the report view by arranging the metric tiles into two, three, or four columns. Use the options in the top-right to select the number of columns.
### Reset the report
If you want to clear your current view and start building the report from scratch, click the **Reset to default** button. This action clears all filters, tiles, and column settings, and cannot be undone.
> ✅ The state of your reports is saved locally. So when you add tiles, change column layout, and configure reports, you will see the same setup when you come back to them later (unless you use the **Reset to default** button to erase the changes).
## Available metrics
The metrics available to compare in the Scenario builder are:
- [Coding days](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802502326)
- [Commits per day](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802305828)
- [Impact](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1801945528)
- [Reaction time](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1801912570)
- [Responsiveness](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1801977972)
- [Thoroughly reviewed PRs](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802338547)
- [Time to first comment](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1801945431)
- [Unreviewed PRs](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1801912594)
- [Sharing index](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802076368)
- [Efficiency](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802666250)
- [Iterated PRs](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802666177)
- [PR iteration time](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802273018)
- [Time to merge](https://appfire.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FD/pages/1802010845)
> ✅ **Tip**: If these metrics look familiar, that's because they're the core commit and PR metrics available in Team health insights. Use Team health insights to dig deeper into each metric, while using Scenario builder to show how they can all work together.
Each tile displays the metric's value during the time period, along with the associated trend, where applicable.
> ℹ️ Trend data is only available for date ranges that contain four or more Monday-to-Sunday weeks. Shorter date ranges are not associated with trends.
In addition to the metric values, use the associated graph to see how the values have changed over time relative to the overall value, the trend, and the Percentile benchmarks for the metric.
This way, you have both visual and numeric ways to understand change over time.
Once all your tiles are configured, use the numerical and visual indicators to see the impact of your change over time, teams, and metrics.