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Explanation of the Metric
Allocation is measured in full-time engineers/employees (FTEs). FTE’s is a calculation of the ratio of time spent on a given piece of work in a day multiplied by the average daily salary for engineers at your company.
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User Tim spent 8 hours working on a Monday. In that time, he committed twice and moved 2 tickets across his Jira board. The table below describes what actions he made, and when they took place.
Action Type | Action Timestamp | Meta |
|---|---|---|
card_action_a | 9:00 am | moved card_a from to do to in progress |
commit_a | 12:00 pm | made a commit against card_a |
card_action_b | 12:02 pm | moved card_b from to do to in progress |
card_action_c | 12:04 pm | moved card_a to QA |
commit_b | 5:00 pm | made a commit against card_b |
For the algorithm to calculate FTE would be as follows:
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card_b = ($236.8 + $1.6) = $238.4
The Goal of Allocation
Allocation shows information in terms stakeholders can understand
A stakeholder doesn’t know how many card actions or commits per day to expect. But they do know how much they’ve budgeted for things, and how many working hours they’re expecting to get out of their teams
Allocation normalizes data across teams that work very differently
Metrics such as velocity, commits, and PRs skew toward teams that do smaller increments more frequently. Just because a team does twice as many tickets doesn’t mean a team does twice as much work. Allocation smooths this out so teams can be compared to one another or aggregated together more effectively
Allocation promises to be superior to time tracking
The cost of time tracking both in time and dollars then becomes a reason to switch to Allstacks
This enables Allstacks to better satisfy the needs of stakeholders outside of engineering
This enables Allstacks to build a proprietary, industry leading solution to capitalization
Areas for Improvement
Tier | Description | Notes/Questions |
|---|---|---|
1 | RBAC to control who can see this metric | We are establishing temporary work arounds to enable experimentation The permanent fix for this will take more research and definition to figure out how this factors into our RBAC regime. |
1 | Commits are not linked to tickets correctly e.g. This developer is showing as ~50% categorized in Allstacks, this is due to those missing linkages between tickets and Commits. n.b. Merge commits should be connected to tickets as well. That said, they should be filtered out in most cases. | Queued up to be resolved. |
1 | Establish a maximum amount of time attributed to an action after a long time of inactivity. e.g. On a Monday, A developer takes an action which begins attributing time to that ticket, they take the rest of the week off. Time is still being attributed to that ticket. | What do we think that maximum should be? |
2 | Shuffling tickets in a backlog shouldn’t count as working on those tickets e.g. I move a ticket up in the backlog and take lunch. This action took seconds, but time will be allocated to this ticket until their next action | |
2 | First action of the day needs to receive a minimum credit | |
2 | Pull request activity should be counted and properly linked | |
2 | Weekend activity should get credit when it happens, otherwise weekends should be ignored | Right now, are weekends counted? |
Best Practices
Filter out the Merge Commits from this metric.