# Normalized throughput Your team's capacity is always in flux. People switching teams, sick leave, and holidays all affect what your team can realistically deliver. This makes it difficult to compare productivity across different time periods, let alone across different teams. **Normalized throughput** accounts for this by dividing completed work by the average number of active full-time equivalent (FTE) developers during a given timeframe. The result is a fairer, more consistent measure of team output. Normalizing works with both completed issues (epics, stories, tasks) and merged pull requests. When comparing across teams, story-based metrics are most meaningful when teams share a common definition of a story. ### How it's calculated **Normalized throughput = Completed stories (or PRs) ÷ Average active FTE** **Example:** Looking at August through October, Team A completed 15 stories. The team has 5 developers, but 2 were fully out for the entirety of August. Averaged across the three-month period, this works out to 4.33 active FTE. Their normalized throughput is **15 ÷ 4.33 = 3.5 stories per FTE**. ### Why it matters Team size on paper rarely reflects who's actually available to work. Normalized throughput accounts for real capacity (not just headcount), so comparisons across time periods and teams are actually meaningful. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://help.swarmia.com/definitions/throughput/normalized-throughput.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.