Balance engineering investments

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

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.

Your team needs to create an investment breakdown (or use the Balance framework provided) and define rules to auto-categorize work. 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 link pull requests to issues using one of the supported mechanisms to improve 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.

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

• 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.

Start by configuring your first categorization rules, and then head to investment balance overview, select a team, and review the categorized and uncategorized work.

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.

Creating an investment breakdown

Flexible categorization rules

Reviewing work within a category

Reviewing uncategorized work

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 a working agreement to help teams categorize work through timely Slack reminders. These reminders are triggered only for work that wasn’t categorized by automated filters, minimizing context switch.

Swarmia provides additional views for viewing and balancing investment efforts:

• Work Log helps teams prioritize their daily efforts.
• Focus Summary shows the distribution of effort across different initiatives.
• Developer Overview helps individuals understand their personal investment balance.

Further reading

• Tools that help you improve focus in your team
• Model for measuring engineering effort in Swarmia
• Learn more from our blog