What happens when people switch teams or leave?

Swarmia tracks the historical team memberships of contributors over time. Contributions made for one team will stay correctly attributed, even if their author later switches teams or leaves.

In most organizations, people switching teams and leaving the organization altogether are a common occurrence. Swarmia accounts for this by tracking the team memberships of contributors over time. That is, if a contribution (such as a pull request) is made while its author belongs to team A, the contribution will continue to show up as belonging to team A, even if its author later switches to team B. The same applies even if the author leaves the organization altogether.

Team hierarchies

This tracking applies to memberships of contributors, but does not extend to team hierarchies. That is, if you move a team to another parent team, the past contributions of that team will move with it.

Example: Your team A belongs to a parent team Analytics, but is later moved to the parent team DevOps:

After the change, if you look at (for instance) the cycle time metrics of the DevOps team, you'll see the historical contributions of team A as part of it, even though A was part of Analytics at the time the contributions were made.

This is by design: we consider teams a fundamental unit of the organization, and thus consider their past contributions as being forever theirs. But during reorgs, teams might get shuffled around to different groupings. We consider the metrics of those groups to be the metrics of the teams they're presently composed of. Any alternative to this would leave you with team selectors full of teams that no longer exist.

Deleting teams

If a team is deleted from Swarmia, it also disappears from any metric views where it was shown. By extension, this means their past contributions disappear from any parent teams the team belonged to.

Example: Your team A belongs to the parent team Analytics, but A is disbanded and deleted from Swarmia. Its members are assigned to other teams.

After the change, if you look at (for instance) the cycle time metrics of the Analytics team, the historical contributions of members of A are no longer included (unless the same contributors also belonged to another child team of Analytics which was not deleted).

This is intentional: including those past contributions would cause inconsistencies between the summary metrics of Analytics, and its constituent child teams. For instance, you might see the team Analytics having merged 2000 pull requests over the past 6 months, but when you drill in to see the metrics of its child teams, there are none.

Initial imports

Historical team memberships are only tracked after importing your data to Swarmia.

Our data sources (such as GitHub) don't provide this information via their API.

Exceptions

During a transitional period, some views do not yet take historical team memberships into account, such as the investment balance and focus summary.