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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. Each action taken on various pieces of work influences the ratio for each day. Our model is most accurate when your team’s work is performed in a tracking system like Git or Jira.
TL;DR
Allstacks looks at all commit and card activity in connected tools to determine how each individual is spending their time over the course of each workday. This is done by measuring the time between each action. If Action A is performed at 1pm, and Action B is performed at 2pm, Action B will receive an hour of credit.
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card_b = ($236.8 + $1.6) = $238.4
How Allocation can be
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Useful
Allocation shows information in terms all stakeholders can understand
Stakeholders don’t always know how many card actions or commits per day to expect. However, often 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 can be a zero-effort replacement for time tracking
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Q: What happens if a contributor goes on vacation? Is there a maximum amount of time that Allstacks will attribute to their first action when they get back?
A: Currently, a contributor will get Allstacks only gives credit for all the business days between their last action and their next action. In the future, we plan to have a maximum amount of credit that can be attributed to an action, and allow that max credit to be configured by the customer, so these situations don’t skew the data.
Best Practices
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days where we detect actions from a contributor. When a user stops work for the day, the clock stops and doesn't resume until they start making actions again on a future date.