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Balance engineering investments

Analyze team focus, improve time allocation and boost focus on top priorities

PreviousFocus summaryNextActivity and effort-based models

Last updated 13 days ago

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Building software products is a balancing act. To build sustainably, engineering teams must balance short-term and long-term goals, as well as new features, technical debt, and productivity improvements.

Swarmia helps engineering organizations get visibility into how they balance their efforts across different priorities and identify where improvements can be made:

  • Leadership can decide which teams need more headcount

  • Engineering Managers and Product Managers keep different priorities in balance

  • Developers can make a business case for a technical improvement project

Prerequisites & Setup

Swarmia uses data from your GitHub organization, and adding a support issue tracker integration improves insights accuracy.

Using Swarmia

In Swarmia, it’s possible to create multiple investment breakdowns, define custom categories, and add custom rules for automatically attributing work to categories. For the primary investment breakdown, investment balance can be viewed on organization, team and individual levels.

  • New things: new products and features

  • Improvements: enhancing existing features, tools, or business processes

  • Productivity: making it easier to get work done in the future

  • Keeping the lights on (KTLO): maintaining existing systems and services

A healthy balance is to allocate 10-15% of the effort to productivity and keep KTLO under 30%. The remaining 60% can be invested in new things and improvements based on your objectives.

Once your highest-level work items are categorized (e.g. initiatives or epics), Swarmia will process the issue hierarchy automatically to auto-categorize all remaining child issues and related coding contributions.

After the initial setup, data in balance views is updated in real-time.

Taking action

Decide on the initial breakdown and aim to achieve at least 80% categorization using automated categorization rules. Consider using a binary breakdown, such as Planned vs. Unplanned work for an easier start.

Consider establishing a convention for labeling your highest-level work items in your issue tracker. Additionally, review your highest-level uncategorized items and the largest investments in each investment category at least once a month.

Introduce the concept of investment balance to teams and facilitate discussions on the ideal balance they should strive for. If teams are struggling with maintaining essential operations (keeping the lights on), ensure they have the necessary support and strategies in place.

Swarmia provides additional views for viewing and balancing investment efforts:

Further reading

Your team needs to create an investment breakdown (or provided) and . We don’t expect perfect issue tracker hygiene, as Swarmia comes with automated and manual tools to improve data quality.

Your team will need to using one of the supported mechanisms to improve accuracy.

We recommend starting with which splits the work into four categories:

Start by configuring , and then head to , select a team, and review the categorized and uncategorized work.

Swarmia provides through timely Slack reminders. These reminders are triggered only for work that wasn’t categorized by automated filters, minimizing context switch.

helps teams prioritize their daily efforts.

shows the distribution of effort across different initiatives.

helps individuals understand their personal investment balance.

Tools that help you

Model for in Swarmia

Learn more from our

use the Balance framework
define rules to auto-categorize work
link pull requests to issues
the Balance framework
your first categorization rules
investment balance overview
a working agreement to help teams categorize work
Work Log
Focus Summary
Developer Overview
improve focus in your team
measuring engineering effort
blog
Creating an investment breakdown
Flexible categorization rules
Reviewing work within a category
Reviewing uncategorized work