Developer effort (FTEs)

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

• Pull requests opened

• Pull request reviews and comments

Activities are weighted, with pull requests and commits counted more heavily than 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.

We adjust the allocated FTE for lengthy periods of inactivity and, if your HR system is connected with Swarmia, for logged time off periods.

Here’s an illustrative example of two developers and what their monthly calculations may look like.

There are several ways we improve the accuracy of effort calculation:

• Only contributors who have a linked GitHub user are taken into account. You can review your contributors in the app settings.
• Contributor's effort can be adjusted or even excluded from calculation in app settings page.
• 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.

• If HR system is connected to Swarmia, then vacations, sick leaves, and time offs are taken into account:

  • Each author's FTE is adjusted based on their available working days in the month.

  • Time offs can be specified in either days or hours:

    • When specified in days, each day counts as a full day off

    • When specified in hours, any partial day off (including half-days) is counted as a full day off

  • For example, if there are 20 working days in a month and a developer has 15 work days off, their total FTE would be 0.25 (calculated as (20 - 15) / 20).

  • Weekends within the time off periods are skipped.

  • Public holidays are not currently considered in the calculations.

• The effort data will be refreshed daily for the past two months. The older data is refreshed weekly.