Developer effort (FTEs)

Learn how developer effort is measured in Swarmia

Swarmia measures developer effort in FTEs (full-time equivalents) to help you understand how your team's time and effort are being spent across different projects and initiatives. This core metric helps teams use Swarmia to balance engineering investments or improve team focus.

How is effort measured in Swarmia?

FTEs reflect the number of hours worked by all employees in an organization. This means that each full-time developer is allocated one FTE per month. Swarmia considers GitHub activities to distribute this monthly effort across the issues and pull requests the developer has worked on, including commits created, pull requests opened, pull request reviews, and comments.

In addition to the aforementioned Git activities, we create a comparable event for every day that an issue is set to in progress and assigned to a developer. This helps allocate effort to work that doesn't have direct code contribution.

Activities are weighted differently, 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, which is distributed between all issues and pull requests the developer has worked on during the month.

We adjust the allocated FTE for extended 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 to improve the accuracy of effort calculation:

Part-time employees

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, indicating that their hours worked are equivalent to half of a full-time employee's hours.

You can adjust each contributor's default FTE value in settings.

Occasional contributors

Contributors with fewer than 10 activities per month are excluded. This accounts for occasional contributors in non-developer roles.

Bots

All bots and events related to bot-authored pull requests are excluded. This also involved reviewing pull requests authored by bots.

Vacations, sick leaves, and time off

Swarmia supports multiple ways to account for vacations, sick leave, and time off.

If HR system is connected to Swarmia, then vacations, sick leaves, and time off 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.

If your HR system cannot be connected, the time off data can also be imported via CSV files.

As an additional safeguard, Swarmia automatically reduces available FTE when contributors are inactive for extended periods, treating it similarly to time off. If someone has no activity for more than 7 days (5 business days), that period is deducted from their monthly FTE allocation.

Other considerations

• Only contributors with a linked GitHub user account are considered. You can review your contributors in the app settings.

• 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.

• Effort data refreshes daily when looking at the past two months and weekly for older periods.