Software engineers are under constant pressure to deliver more work in less time. Product managers want shorter timelines, and leadership often views AI as the magic pill that will make everything go faster. But what if I told you that the bottleneck in your software development lifecycle probably isn't the time it takes to write the code? It's actually everything else. Time in active state vs. inactive state When looking at team productivity, an important metric to pay attention to is throughput — how much work the team completes in any given time period. For example, you might look at how many tasks the team completes each day. One key to increasing throughput is often overlooked: reduce the amount of time any given task spends in inactive status. Any given task can only be in one of two states — active or inactive. When a task is in an active state, you are actively working on it (creating designs, writing code, reviewing code, etc.).…