Measuring developer effort

Swarmia measures developer effort in FTEs (full-time equivalent).

What is FTE?

A full-time equivalent (FTE) is a unit of measurement used to determine the number of full-time hours worked by all employees in an organization. If your organization considers 160 hours a full-time work month, an employee working 160 hours per month would have an FTE of 1.0. In contrast, a part-time employee working only 80 hours per month would have an FTE of 0.5 — which shows that their hours worked are equivalent to half of a full-time employee.

In Swarmia, FTEs are measured in months.

How is effort measured in Swarmia?

Each developer is allocated one FTE per month. Swarmia considers GitHub and issue tracker activities to distribute this monthly effort (FTE) across the issues and pull requests the developer has worked on:

• Commits created
• Issues completed
• Pull request activity: merges, reviews and comments

We calculate the sum of these data points for a given month and then normalize it for each developer. Normalizing means we take into account different coding and working styles. In practice, this means a developer can have a maximum of 1 FTE in a month, it is distributed for all issues and pull requests the developer has worked on during the month.

Here’s an illustrative example of a single developer within a month.

• Only contributors who have a linked GitHub user are taken into account. You can review your contributors in the app settings.
• Contributors with little to no activity are excluded.
• All bots and events related to bot-authored pull requests are excluded.
• The current month's effort is adjusted. For example, if today is the 15th day, Swarmia attributes only 0.5 FTE for the current month.
• The effort data will be refreshed daily for the past two months. The older data is refreshed weekly.