> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://help.swarmia.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://help.swarmia.com/features/focus/balance-engineering-investments/activity-and-effort-based-models.md).

# Activity and effort-based models

## **Activity-based model**

The activity-based model shows activity on pull requests and issues grouped by investment categories. The activity model includes both completed issues and merged pull requests.

## **Effort-based model**

The effort-based model normalizes GitHub and issue tracker activities for each developer. Normalizing means Swarmia takes into account different coding and working styles. In practice, this means a developer can have a maximum of 1 FTE (full-time equivalent) in a month. The FTE is distributed across all issues and pull requests the developer has worked on during the month.

[Read more about how Swarmia measures developer effort.](https://help.swarmia.com/metrics-and-definitions/developer-effort-ftes)

## **Activities are based on team memberships**

If your team members have contributed towards issues belonging to other teams, by default also those issues will be visible in your team's investment balance. Your team is investing its time somewhere, and the report shows you where that investment goes, even if it's not for the things you might've expected. You can filter out these items by selecting *Only work owned by team* as shown in the image below.

<figure><img src="/files/dzMUMaaYH5bPJ6zYhlJ8" alt=""><figcaption><p>Investment balance with "Only work owned by team" selected</p></figcaption></figure>

## **How work is grouped by category**

We start by looking at all contributions by all team members of the selected team, then determine the investment category based on [**the rules you've set up.**](https://help.swarmia.com/configuration/organization-setup/investment-balance)

Then work is grouped by investment category (these categories are [**mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive**](https://help.swarmia.com/configuration/organization-setup/investment-balance)).

If multiple tasks belong to a bigger project, **it's possible to have different investment categories assigned to each task and the project as a whole**. In this case, we'll show each task in its respective category of work.


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